


Best Laid Plans

by VanishingPoint



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - Star Wars Expanded Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Force Echoes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Psychological Torture, Rescue Missions, The Force Ships It, Torture, cw: asphyxiation, cw: vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:27:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 33,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24302092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanishingPoint/pseuds/VanishingPoint
Summary: The Rebellion stole the plans for the Death Star, but instead of sending the princess of Alderaan, they sent long-time supporter of the Rebellion and one of the last of the Jedi Order, Cal Kestis.What if Cal was taken captive by Vader, and not Leia? What if he sent his loyal droid, BD-1, to seek out Obi Wan Kenobi on the planet below? How might things have turned out if there had been a Jedi in his prime around during the events of the original film?
Relationships: Cal Kestis & Luke Skywalker, Cal Kestis/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 176
Kudos: 522





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I just played this game, and I’m in love with all of the characters. I started thinking about how the game’s timeline fits into the movie timeline, and it turns out that Cal would be like thirty-two or so by the time A New Hope takes place. I just really wanted to explore what it might have been like to have a Jedi in their prime thrown into the mix of the movie’s events.

Cal looked out the ship’s viewport and considered the Imperial destroyer that hung above them, seemingly immobile as it matched the speed of their damaged engines. “How long, you think?”

The ship’s captain, a short Rebel fighter named Rez who had a heavy accent and—as far as Cal had been able to tell—not a single ounce of humor in his entire body, stood at the navigation panel, arms crossed. “I don’t think we’re making it to Alderaan, Jedi.”

Cal had long stopped trying to convince the people on this ship to use his name. People who hadn’t spent much time with Jedi tended to mistake the term for an honorific. He glanced at the captain sidelong. “Any ideas?”

“We’re near Tattooine,” Captain Rez offered.

The name was familiar. “Desert planet?”

“That’s right,” Captain Rez said. “We’re coming up on it now. You’ll see it out the viewport soon.”

Cal considered that. “Could we send someone in an escape pod?”

“They’ll be scanning for life signs. You get into one of those escape pods, they’ll shoot you down long before you get anywhere near planetside.”

Cal hummed. All around him, the Rebel fighters were buzzing, officers speaking into comms, readying to be boarded. A siren began to sound, and the captain excused himself and stepped away to speak with his officers.

Cal blocked all of the noise out, along with the pounding in his own chest, and turned to BD. “Why do I recognize that planet’s name?” He asked, voice low.

From his perch on Cal’s shoulder, BD chirped helpfully, following Cal’s lead and dropping his speaker volume.

“Oh, that’s right.” There was a friend of the Rebellion there. An old Jedi that Cere had mentioned once. He’d been part of the old council supposedly, but hid out after Order 66. Cal had never met him personally, but Cere had gone to him for help once. With no luck, apparently - he’d been adamant that he not come out of hiding for any reason.

“But we’ve gotten so close,” Cal muttered. So many people had come together to get these plans into Rebel hands. Too many for them to fail now.

On his shoulder, BD chirped thoughtfully, and Cal looked up at the droid and grinned. “You’re right, BD. Desperate times.” He walked to the group of officers, who all fell respectfully silent as Cal approached. He would never get used to that.

“Captain,” Cal said. “We’ve got a plan.”

“Then I probably shouldn’t know,” Captain Rez said. “Go. Whatever you’re going to do.”

“Thank you,” Cal said. He held out a hand and the captain took it, and then he was edging his way out of the busy command room, dodging people down the hallway and then, when he reached an empty stretch of the main walkway, he stepped off into a side hallway and let the door close behind him.

They were far from the main crew areas of the ship, but Cal could still hear the blare of the klaxon, and the thundering of feet as the fighters prepared to be boarded. Beyond the walls of their ship, he could hear the hail-storm clatter of mag-locks fixing them into place and settling them firmly in the Imperial ship’s tractor beam. There wasn’t much time.

“BD,” Cal said, and the droid leapt obediently from his customary perch on his shoulders and dropped to the ground in front of him. His display was lit up with an anxious red but his antennae were forward and alert.

Cal knelt down and held out the data disc. “Here. Take this.” BD chirped his confusion, but delicately leaned forward anyway and allowed Cal to slide the disc into one of his drives. “Now you have to go. Get to the escape pods and get to the planet below.”

BD staggered back a step, almost cartoonish as he trilled out a high note of protest. He wouldn’t leave Cal. They went together or not at all.

“I can’t get on the pod with you, buddy. They’ll sense me.”

An angry trill.

“I don’t know how to shield a ship with the Force.” Another shrill cascade of beeps. “I know Mirren could, but she’s not here.”

BD rocked back and forth on his feet for a moment, then chirped softly.

“Not this time,” Cal said, standing and stepping away from the droid. He could hear the gunfire approaching, and the sound of his comrades fighting and dying. Something terrible was coming, something familiar that spread into the Force like ice into water and nearly choked Cal with the paralyzing fear of it. He touched the top of BD’s head, allowing himself a brief moment to focus on the Force echo that always clung to BD’s little body. Courage, comfort, the gentle sound of Cere’s instrument and the smell of Greeve’s cooking. He leaned into the memories, pulled in a long breath, then sat back and gave BD a final pat. “You know what you have to do. Find Obi Wan Kenobi. Get this disc to the Rebellion. Complete the mission. You’re my only hope.”

More shrill disagreement, and when he backed toward the door, BD followed.

“No,” Cal said, his chest tight. He tried to project confidence, to make the certainty in his voice outweigh the fear. He pointed toward the opposite door, beyond which lay the escape pod bay. “Think of all the people who died to get those plans. This is bigger than you and me. You have to go. Now.” He was by the door now. He could see hot flashes of blaster fire streaking past the little window portal, illuminating him and BD in brief reds and greens.

Behind him, BD hesitated, then gave his tiny little body a sharp shake and straightened up. He let out a firm triplet of resolved beeps.

“Thank you,” Cal said. “May the Force be with you, too.”

He watched BD go, and then turned away as BD opened the escape bay door and locked it behind him with a soft click.

Cal released a breath, already missing the little droid’s comforting weight on his back. BD would be okay. He’d find Kenobi, and they’d be able to get the plans to the Rebellion. Cal just had to slow the imperials down enough for BD to get a head start.

He reached out to the Force for strength, then stepped out into the hallway. The door was situated midway between two large doorways. To his left, a half-dozen of the Rebels were ducked behind large crates, holding the entry against a crowd of stormtroopers at the other end of the hall and still spilling in through the open doorway. Cal darted out, stepping between the two groups, the sound and heat of his lightsaber filling the narrow space as he deflected several shots back at the stormtroopers.

The stormtroopers wheeled back, several struck down instantly by the deflected shots. Cal took advantage of their surprise to hurl himself forward, pulling the Force with him and driving it into the group like a battering ram. Most went down, and he made quick work of the last couple before stepping over their bodies and moving into the hallway beyond, toward the sounds of more fighting, faintly aware of the cheering of the Rebel fighters far behind him.

It had been some time since Cal had fought stormtroopers in close quarters like this. If anything, they posed less of a threat than he remembered. They were all low-level troops, no officers, and certainly nobody specifically trained to hold off a Jedi. It made sense. They hadn’t had to fight Jedi in a decade. He cut through them like a knife through a ripe jogan fruit, aware of the Rebel fighters that he passed taking up positions behind him and settling in for a siege. If this kept up, they could perhaps hold the Imperial troops off for a good while. Cal felt his spirits bolstered as he moved toward the center hatch entrance, where the Imperial troops had broken in.

Then, the dark presence in the Force pressed against his mind again, something so heavy and terrible that it made him miss his step and stagger, catching an unlucky Imperial laser bolt to his shoulder. He yelped, then gritted his teeth and summoned the Force and threw the stormtroopers ahead of him off of their feet.

He raised his saber again and leaped toward them, then froze, caught mid-step, muscles no longer obeying his commands. The harsh rhythm of mechanical breathing filled his ears. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the red glow of a lightsaber stepping in through the door ahead of him. A great weight crashed down upon him, and he hit the floor as if he’d been thrown there by a giant hand, the impact forcing his back into the tiling and driving the air from his lungs.

A black boot kicked his lightsaber away from his hand. Cal mustered his strength and heaved against the invisible weight, feeling it budge for just a moment before a deep voice above him said, “None of that,” and the weight seemed to increase tenfold. The world went dim. He swore he felt his bones creaking. It took every ounce of his focus in the Force to keep from getting crushed.

When the weight lifted, it was followed quickly by several pairs of hands that hauled him to his feet. Cal’s arm was numb. He could smell the acrid, scorched fabric of the blaster burn in his jacket.

The pair of black-booted feet entered his line of vision, the trailing black edges of a cape swirling around then.

“A lightsaber,” the deep voice mused. “To think I doubted my troops’ reports.”

Cal forced his head up, trying to get some stiffness into his legs, half impeded and half supported by the stormtroopers that stood at either side of him, their grips tight on his arms.

“Lord Vader,” Cal said, surprised by how steady he sounded. He hadn’t seen the man in fifteen years. Not since their fight—if it could even be called that—on the inquisitor base. The saber wound in his side was long healed, but it twinged now, in parallel with the fresh blaster wound in his shoulder.

“You,” Vader said. He stepped forward slowly, helmet cocked slightly to the side, those massive mask eyes pinning Cal in place more effectively than the stormtroopers to either side of him. “I know you.”

Cal swallowed, but kept his mouth shut.

“Yes, I think it has been some time, hasn’t it?” Vader gestured at an officer and said, “Search him.” The officer stepped forward and began patting Cal down, from shoulders to boots and then back up again. As he did so, Vader examined Cal’s lightsaber, his gloved hands finding the center latch that would split it into two pieces.

The officer finally stood back and shook his head. Vader hummed and tucked Cal’s saber onto his belt, next to his own.

“You lost me the holocron, all those years ago,” Vader said, conversationally, turning away from Cal for a moment to gesture at several officers off to the side, who turned and left the room via a small sliding door. “And my second best Inquisitor,” Vader continued, returning his focus to Cal once more. “And now here you are again, between me and the plans I’ve been searching for.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cal said.

“Don’t waste my time, Jedi,” Vader said, flatly. “Where are the plans?”

“I don’t have what you want,” Cal said, his tone as steady as Vader’s. He thought of little BD, likely hurtling toward the planet at that exact moment. “This is a diplomatic ship. We’re on our way to pick up the ambassador at Alderaan. The Senate will not stand for this kind of unprovoked—“ he cut off as his throat closed up seemingly of its own accord. He jerked in the stormtroopers’ grips, hands curling into fists.

“You will tell me what you did with the plans,” Vader said, one hand outstretched, the fingers and thumb slowly pinching in toward each other.

Panic tried to set in. Instead, Cal let his mind go blank, letting go of any attempt to hold his body still—there was no point—dimly aware that his legs and arms were spasming weakly, heart pounding in his ears, lights flashing in his eyes, and just when he was certain that Vader was actually going to kill him right then and there and he was hoping with all of his might that BD-1 would be okay without him, the pressure on his throat relented. He sagged, wheezing.

Vader lowered his hand. “You may martyr yourself if you like,” he said. “It will do nothing to help your cause.”

“Won’t hurt it,” Cal gasped.

Vader considered him for another long moment. “Indeed,” he finally said. “Take him to the interrogation cells.”

#

On the planet below, a small moisture farm was just beginning to see the first pale orange fingers of dawn on the horizon. Inside the main living unit, the young man within one of the bedrooms struggled into wakefulness and thrashed right out of his bed.

On the floor, tangled in his sheets, he held both hands to his neck as the suffocating sensation followed him from his dream and into the real world. It took several long, rasping breaths before the ghostly hand left his throat and faded back into his dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: If my math’s right, Cal’s just one year younger than Han Solo’s supposed to be at the time of A New Hope. So, if Leia can fall for Han, then Luke can definitely fall for precious cinnamon roll Cal.


	2. Chapter 2

Luke swore, hands still pressed protectively against his throat. He tried to remember the dream. It had been vivid and dark and confusing, nothing like his normal dreams. A man had been desperately afraid—not for himself, but for something else, or maybe someone else. There had been an image he was clinging to, or a name, but it was difficult to remember. Luke focused, but the dream slipped from his grip, and he finally gave up and let it sink back to that place in which all dreams lose themselves in upon waking.

Despite the odd start to his day, the rest of Luke’s morning passed like any other. He soon forgot the dream, caught up instead in a quarrel with his aunt and uncle about—something. When one of the moisture harvesters near the edge of the farm went on the fritz, Uncle Owen suggested that Luke go out to clear his head, and Luke grudgingly gathered up the toolkit and took the speeder to check it out.

It was late morning, not quite the hottest part of the day, but Luke’s hair and clothes were already sticking to him once he reached the edge of the family property. The spindly tower of the broken moisture harvester jutted against the clear blue sky.

He brushed the sand from the control panel and set it to run diagnostics. He thought it looked like it probably just had a corroded cable - an easy enough fix.

He walked back to the speeder to rifle through his toolkit, then paused as he became aware of the sensation of being watched.

“Hello?” Luke looked around, squinting against the midday light. “Anybody there?”

There was a long pause, almost long enough that Luke decided he must be imagining things, but then there was a soft scuffling sound from a nearby dune, and a small, bipedal droid trotted toward him. It paused several paces away from him. Its paint was scuffed, its casing dented, and its little antennae were flattened anxiously backward.

Luke blinked, then crouched. “Hey there little guy,” he said.

The droid bleeped a tentative greeting.

“Are you alright?” Luke said. When that didn’t garner more than an anxious shuffle, he tried again. “What are you doing all the way out here, uh, BD-1?” Luke said, reading the identification on the droid’s casing. A droid of his size likely wouldn’t have survived the long trek between town and their farm. Perhaps someone had abandoned him, or he’d gotten lost from a group of travelers.

The droid trilled.

“You’re on a mission?” Luke said. He smiled. “What kind of mission?”

The droid gave a few soft beeps.

“I’m sorry you’ve lost your person,” Luke said. “Are you looking for them? Maybe I know them.”

The droid chirped.

“Obi Wan Kenobi?” Luke repeated, startled that the name did, at least somewhat, sound familiar. “That’s your person?”

The droid shook its little body negatively, then trilled sadly.

“Oh, I see,” Luke said. “Well, maybe I can help you out. I don’t know an Obi Wan, but I do know a Kenobi. He doesn’t live far from here.”

BD-1 gave a sharp chirp of surprise, then bounced in excitement and beeped hopefully.

Luke laughed. “Sure, I can take you to him.” He was hardly eager to get back to the farm, anyway. This mysterious little droid and its clandestine ‘mission’ were the most interesting things he’d run across in ages. He turned to his speeder and patted the passenger seat. “Hop on.”

#

This destroyer must have been in operation for quite some time. Cal could tell—the cell was filled with echoes of fear and pain that weren’t his own. They threatened to overwhelm him whenever he let his guard down. The cot positively radiated with stress, so he found a spot to sit on the floor instead. His shoulder ached terribly.

At one point, he thought he heard some of the Rebel fighters being shepherded along outside his cell. It seemed they may have been locked in a cell nearby. When he focused and lowered his barriers just a little, he thought he became aware them speaking to each other and he longed to not be alone. Were he feeling stronger, he might have reached out to them, at least to get some reassurance from their presence, but he held back. If he opened himself up too much, he may not have the strength to close himself back off again.

He meditated, carefully building up the barriers in his mind to hold the echoes at bay. He imagined that he was laying a wall brick by brick, each addition bringing relief as it blocked a little bit more of the echoes’ intensity.

He thought of BD-1 and wondered if the little droid had made it safely to the planet. His gut told him that BD-1 was still alive, and that he hadn’t been captured, at least not yet. Perhaps he’d even managed to find Kenobi. Maybe even now they were plotting to get off-planet. If anybody could make miracles happen, it would be BD. Cal took solace in that thought. All wasn’t lost.

The door slid open, and Cal let himself drift back up out of his meditation, taking his time about it. The stormtroopers outside his cell pulled him impatiently to his feet.

Cal weighed his options as they cuffed him. Vader may have taken his lightsaber, but he still had the Force. He could nudge their minds, or fight. They hadn’t drugged him. Somehow, knowing that didn’t make him feel better. Force users were famously difficult to contain. Vader would know this, if nothing else. He wouldn’t make the mistake of letting Cal get an upper hand.

Experimentally, Cal dropped his defenses just a little and felt out with the Force, and then rushed to throw his barriers back up, head pounding as he felt the dark, wrathful presence of Vader, so close, within easy reach.

He grimaced. That explained it. Vader obviously felt he could handle anything Cal could throw at him, and he was paying attention.

The stormtroopers flanked him and led him out of the cell and into a narrow, dim hallway. Cal glanced around and saw a larger holding cell. A translucent red force field served as its door, and his heart leapt as he saw the group of the captured Rebel fighters within. Some were stretched out on the ground, but as he and his guards passed, those who were awake alerted their fellows, and he met a dozen pairs of eyes—faces that he hadn’t truly gotten to know in the short time he’d spent on their ship, but whom he nonetheless recognized. He didn’t see the captain. Perhaps he was in a separate cell.

As the troopers marched him past, Cal inclined his head slightly at the crew, and those who saw him returned the greeting, one or two of them holding their fists to their chests in salute. Cal held onto the sight of them as he crossed the short hallway and into the room beyond.

Within, set in the center of a plain square room like something rotten, sat an interrogation table. Cal had hardly expected otherwise, but his stomach still sank at the sight of it, and he didn’t realize he’d stopped walking until one of the stormtroopers pushed at the center of his back to get him moving again.

Echoes of fear and pain resonated through the object. Every fiber of Cal’s body revolted against it. He struggled without consciously deciding to and fought the urge to retch as the troopers pushed him into the machine and began strapping him down.

He carefully curled his hands into fists to keep his palms away from the metal. He still had his gloves on, thankfully, but even approaching the machine had triggered his powers with the intensity of its echoes. He concentrated on building his barriers back up, fear muddling his focus.

The electrical panels that surrounded him were similar to the ones he’d seen in Trilla’s memory, though the design appeared to have undergone some iterations in the decades since. They were more fitted to the table, arching over him and splitting his view of the room into sectioned rings, almost entirely blocking his view of the control console that stood to the right of him, and he marveled that this was what his mind chose to fixate on as one of the stormtroopers snapped the final restraint closed across Cal’s legs.

The panels began to hiss and spit and tilt toward him, and then he gasped and arched against the restraints, jaw clacking shut, head snapping against the table behind him. He felt his muscles and skin tearing apart, splitting themselves against his bones like the strings on an overtuned hallikset, every nerve ending firing but somehow he wasn’t dying, and he could barely suck in a breath before it tore back out of him in a scream.

Eventually, the pain stopped. His exhausted muscles unclenched. He sagged against the table, gasping.

The stormtroopers didn’t ask him anything. They hardly seemed to look in his direction—not even to adjust the controls, which seemed to be entirely automated, as they hadn’t moved, but the panels were beginning to spark again, and Cal was dragged under again.

It went that way for some time, timeless stretches of agony broken only by short reprieves during which he would try to catch his breath and point his eyes up at the ceiling and do his best not to look at the troopers in the room. He wasn’t ashamed. Not of the screaming or the begging, or the tears that were soaking into the collar of his shirt—these were just what a body did when it was under this kind of strain. He knew he was more than just this body. But he still couldn’t bring himself to look at the stormtroopers. Somehow, their disinterest was worse than any amount of antagonism. As if his suffering meant little more to them than background noise.

Then, sometime in the space between cycles, Cal became aware of Vader in the room, standing in front of him, watching impassively.

Cal looked back at him, aware that he was shivering, briefly making eye contact with his own pale, distorted reflection in the shiny black material of the eyes of Vader’s helmet. He squeezed his eyes shut to block it out.

Another cycle hit, the pain dragged Cal under again, and when he re-emerged, the closest stormtrooper hit some buttons on the console and the panels retracted. The table tilted so that it was slightly more upright. He could feel the bruises in his wrists and ankles and chest as they shifted against the straps.

“Cal Kestis,” Vader said.

Cal flinched and closed his eyes again at the sound of his own name.

“Where are the plans?” Vader said, without any inflection in his voice. “You needn’t suffer any more. This can be easy for you.”

Cal swallowed. It felt like razors were lodged in his raw throat. That was fine. He had nothing to say anyway.

“I’ve spoken with the captain of your ship,” Vader said, when it became clear that Cal wasn’t going to respond. “He was most unhelpful. But at least I was able to gather that you are, indeed, the man to talk to.”

“You killed him,” Cal said.

“He brought his own end.”

Cal’s aching chest constricted. The captain hadn’t yet been a friend - they hadn’t travelled long together, but they’d shared drinks more than once during their time aboard the ship. Cal felt the anger and the grief flare up inside of him, and then released them and let them flow away with his next breath. “I see,” he said finally. His voice rasped. “You live up to your reputation. Those who fear you don’t fear your power.”

“Is that so?” Perhaps Vader sounded amused. “Do tell.”

Cal opened his eyes again, and that helmet was so close to him. The mechanical breathing filled his ears. Vader might have been a statue, for how still he stood.

“They fear your pettiness. And your cruelty,” Cal said, knowing that he may be signing for his own death, perhaps even hoping for it—dead, he could betray no one. Sure enough, Vader shifted closer and Cal felt a terrible crushing sensation against his throat. He twisted and choked in his restraints. Vader’s helmet swam in his vision.

“I’m afraid you’ve not even begun to acquaint yourself with my cruelty,” Vader said. The pressure on Cal’s throat finally released. Vader gestured at the stormtrooper, and Cal was still coughing and gasping when the machine sparked to life and he was swallowed in the agony once more.

When he re-emerged, some eternity later, Vader was gone and Cal was alone again with just the stormtroopers. He could hear the last notes of his own screams echoing back at him, bouncing around the small room. Some distant part of himself marveled at how inhuman his raw voice sounded, like tearing metal or the shrieking sound of air rushing from a burst bulkhead. Nothing like a person at all.

The troopers undid his restraints and, when he proved unable to stand on his own, propped him up between them to return him to his cell. They passed the Rebel crew’s holding cell, and Cal, hardly able to keep his eyes open beyond slits, saw that several of the crew were at the edge of the forcefield, watching him pass with tight expressions. He hoped faintly they hadn’t been able to hear him. He knew how terrible it was, to witness the echoes of pain and be able to do nothing.

He wished he could tell them that he hadn’t betrayed them. Not yet, anyway.

The stormtroopers deposited him on the bunk in his cell. It hummed with the echoes of suffering and loneliness, long hours spent nursing wounds alone, startling at every sound in the hallway beyond. He had no energy to raise his barriers, and the echoes seeped in, too present for him to push away.

He waited until the guards were gone, and then he mustered his last ounce of energy to roll off of the bunk and onto the floor. The echoes went, blessedly, quiet.


	3. Chapter 3

Cal was dreaming. He thought he heard someone speaking gently to him. A warm hand pressed against his forehead, the touch comforting, almost parental. With it, some of the pain in his head and shoulder receded.

“Where are you?” The voice asked, and Cal tried to respond, thought maybe he did. He pictured the Imperial ship, and the view to the planet below, and then briefly struggled to push away the image of Vader, looming over him.

“I see,” the voice said. Maybe it sounded troubled. “I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Cal woke, and the cold and the sterile white lights of the room washed back over him. He swallowed, already missing the gentle presence in his dream, and then curled in on himself and tried to find sleep again.

#

Luke reached Ben Kenobi’s home a little after noon.

On the ride over, he’d tried speaking with the droid, but had learned little. BD-1 was determined that the only person who could know his mission was Kenobi.

“How will you know it’s the right Kenobi?” Luke had asked, and BD had beeped uncertainly, as if he hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might not know for sure.

“I’m sure you’ll be able to tell,” Luke was quick to reassure him, and the droid brightened somewhat.

Ben Kenobi’s home was built into the side of a small hill, its walls thick and its windows small to keep out the heat. The pathway to the main doorway was bordered with small, spiky plants, their red leaves and pale blue flowers the only spots of color in the otherwise gray and rocky landscape.

Luke approached the doorway, BD-1 trailing behind him, hopping carefully over the plants. When Luke raised his hand to knock, the droid beeped softly.

“There’s nobody inside?” Luke said.

BD-1 made an affirmative sound, then began to walk around the side of the house instead.

Luke followed. “BD-1,” he hissed. “You can’t just go snooping around people’s houses. It’s not—” He cut himself off as they rounded the corner and saw the hooded figure seated on the ground.

The figured was propped up in the shade, his back against the side of the house, as if he’d just sat down to rest. At the sound of their approach, though, the figure looked up, then stood and pushed back his hood to reveal Ben Kenobi.

Luke grimaced, feeling a little foolish. “Hey Ben,” he said. “Sorry about that. I was trying to keep this droid from intruding.”

“That’s quite alright, Luke,” Kenobi said. He smiled, but looked distracted. In fact, he looked positively haggard as he said, “I apologize, I’m rather busy at the moment.”

Luke looked him up and down but decided against asking how busy he really could be during an apparent midday nap. Instead, he said, “This little droid’s pretty upset. Do you think you could just talk to him real quick? He thinks he might have something to say to you.”

Kenobi frowned, then turned to look at BD-1. “Is that so? What do you need, little one?”

BD-1 looked up at Luke, then trotted over to Ben and beeped up hopefully at him.

Ben chuckled. “Well how should I know if I’m the man you’re looking for?” BD beeped again, and Ben immediately sobered. “Ah,” he said, a note of wonder entering his voice. He pursed his lips. “Where did you hear that name?”

The droid chimed suspiciously.

“Okay, yes.” Ben said. “I am Obi Wan. Or, well, I used to be. A long time ago.” He glanced sideways at Luke, who did his best to hide his curiosity, then back at the droid. He sat on a rock and bent closer to BD-1’s level. “Now, can you tell me?”

In response, BD-1 tilted up at Ben, as if giving him a long, hard look, and then he took several steps back and turned to project a holodisplay.

After a moment, a man’s voice crackled out of BD-1’s speakers. “Not this time,” it said, and then the hologram displayed a man stepping into frame. He wore a plain jacket and had a friendly face, though it was currently pinched at the edges. “You know the mission. Find Obi Wan Kenobi. Get this disc to the Rebellion. You’re my only hope.” He paused, perhaps listening to something BD-1 was saying in response, then he said quickly, “No.” He smiled encouragingly. “Think of the Rebellion. Think of all the people who died to get those plans. This is bigger than you and me. You have to go. Now.” He stepped away, his form growing smaller in the holodisplay. There was the sound of blaster fire in the background, and he grinned into the holocamera, “Thank you. May the Force be with you, too.”

After a moment, Ben gently asked, “What is your master’s name, little one?”

The little droid was still looking at the frozen image of his master as he responded.

“Cal Kestis,” Ben repeated. “I don’t know that name. But he looks young. He was probably a child when...” he trailed off, then glanced at Luke and cleared his throat. “I sensed someone early this morning—a Jedi, I thought. A powerful user of the Force, at least. I heard him cry out for help.” He frowned at Luke’s expression. “Ah, I see you heard it too.”

“Was that—? I had a dream,” Luke muttered, hand coming up unconsciously to touch his neck.

Kenobi nodded. “Yes. I’ve been meditating, trying to reach out to him. I thought perhaps I could ascertain his location, and then contact some member of the Rebellion to send him some help.” He sighed heavily. “I see now that isn’t the path forward. There is more at work than I’d guessed.”

“You have contact with the Rebellion?” Luke said, incredulous. Old man Ben was hardly what Luke pictured when he thought of a Rebel fighter. “What are you doing all the way out here?”

Kenobi considered him for a moment. Finally, seeming to come to a decision, he said, “I was a Jedi knight, young Luke. A defender of the old republic. In my past life.”

“A Jedi,” Luke repeated.

“Indeed,” Ben said, then turned back to the droid. “Now. Tell me. What is it that Cal Kestis wants us to deliver to the Rebellion?”

The droid launched into a long, melodic explanation of trills and beeps Luke didn’t recognize any of the names, or recognize all of the places mentioned, but there was no mistaking the phrase planet killer.

As the droid’s story unfolded, Ben’s expression turned grim. “I see,” he said, when the BD-1 was finished. “This is grave indeed.” He sat back on his rock, apparently in deep thought, and then he said, “Where is it that I’m meant to bring these plans?” BD-1 beeped in response, and Ben nodded, glancing at Luke out of the corner of his eye. “Alderaan? Yes, I suppose that makes sense. I’m acquainted with an old ambassador there. Makes sense he’d be involved.”

The old man stood abruptly, and Luke, who had found himself also staring at the frozen Jedi in the hologram, pulled his gaze away from it and said, “What are you doing to do?”

Ben shrugged. “Deliver it, I suppose.”

“I want to help,” Luke said, then faltered. “Only, my aunt and uncle. They’d never let me go.”

“You must do what you believe is right,” Ben said, brushing the sand from his robes. “But know this. If these plans are as precious as they say, then Imperial troops are already on Tattooine, and they will be looking not only for this droid, but for anyone who may have met with it.”

Luke felt a cold chill down his spine. He glanced down, at the frozen image of Cal Kestis, remembered the ghost of fingers around his throat, tried his best not to imagine that friendly face at the hands of the Empire. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”

The droid looked between them and trilled, bouncing eagerly.

Ben sobered. “Ah. We—I’m afraid not, little one,” he said, gently. “If we are to fulfill your mission, we cannot sidetrack to rescue your master. However,” he added, when the droid gave a sharp negative shake of his body, “we can inform the Rebels at Alderaan of his plight, and I have no doubt they will do their best to recover him.”

The droid stood very still as Ben said this. Then, without saying anything else, took a step back from the both of them. The image of the man in the hologram flickered and then shut off. The droid’s display roiled with distressed reds and oranges.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said. The droid didn’t respond, just looked resolutely away from them both. Ben sighed, then turned to Luke. “Come inside. I have some things I must gather, and some things I must tell you. There is much for you to learn.”

#


	4. Chapter 4

“Who did you contact?” a voice said, rousing Cal from the blissful dark.

For a kind moment, Cal had no idea where he was. But then the bone-deep ache in every part of him pulled him back into the present. Even his eyelids and fingertips hurt. Stars, he was so tired.

He cracked an eye open and saw the toe of a shiny black boot. He didn’t bother trying to look up. He knew who it belonged to.

Perhaps sensing that Cal hadn’t truly understood him the first time, Vader repeated himself with surprising patience. “I said, who did you contact?”

Cal forced his arms under him and managed to clamber to his knees. He tilted his head until he could somewhat meet Vader’s gaze. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, initially meaning it, and then swallowing a grimace as he recalled his dreams—or not just dreams, if Vader had sensed them as well—of two points of warm light, flashing briefly into his awareness like suns seen against closed eyelids. He thought maybe he remembered a kind presence, one that reminded him almost of Cere. But no, she was systems away, far out of reach. Who, then?

“I thought so,” Vader said, reading Cal’s face. “Are there other Jedi in the Rebellion?”

“Not that I know of,” Cal said, refusing to so much as think of the mysterious Kenobi on the planet below. If BD-1 had made contact, then surely an old Jedi council member like Kenobi would know better than to reach out. He would know there was too much at stake.

Vader hummed, and something about the cavalier tone made the hairs on Cal’s neck and arms stand up. Something was different. Whatever he’d been facing yesterday, the Vader of today was a different adversary entirely.

“No matter,” Vader said. “We can discuss that later.” He gestured, and an invisible force caught the center of Cal’s chest and dragged him painfully upward, past his tiptoes for a long moment before settling him on unsteady feet. The stormtroopers in the hallway behind him came to flank him. Cal sucked in a sharp breath as their armored gloves tightened around his raw wrists, and when Vader released his hold on him, he struggled to stay upright.

“Tiring already, Jedi?” Vader asked. “Perhaps, then, you’d like to tell me what you did with the plans.” As he spoke, he was turning away and sweeping back out of the cell. The stormtroopers pulled Cal into step behind him.

Cal didn’t respond. They turned down the familiar path to the interrogation room.

“What if I told you,” Vader said, abruptly halting in the middle of the hallway and causing the troopers to yank Cal to a halt, “that we know you sent the plans down to Tattooine. With a droid.”

Cal’s heart skipped a beat. He tried not to react, and knew he’d failed and hated himself a little bit for how easy he was to read. He wouldn’t wish his predicament on another soul, but he had, as Greez had once told him, the worst bluffing face in the galaxy. “If that’s the case,” he said carefully, eyes on the ground, “then why am I still here?”

“Still here on this ship?” Vader asked, sounding almost amused. He turned now to face Cal. “Or still alive?”

Cal shrugged. “Aren’t they the same thing?” He certainly harbored no illusions of ever leaving this ship again. It really was just a question of timing at this point - how long he would last before he broke or Vader tired of him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the Rebel crew in their cell, filtered red behind the forcefield. He didn’t let himself look, for fear that that may put them in Vader’s sights.

“A reasonable question,” Vader said. He rested a hand on his hip, fingers wrapping delicately around Cal’s lightsaber. “I’ve spoken to the emperor. He’d very much like to meet you. He’s always searching for new apprentices. I’ll be taking you to him directly, once we’ve recovered the plans.”

As Vader spoke, a rushing sound filled Cal’s ears. Cal thought of Trilla, and Cere, and felt such a terrible fear and revulsion rise from the core of him that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. “No,” he said, the word barely gaining enough strength to leave his lips. “I would rather die.”

“You feel that way now, perhaps,” Vader said, and turned away from him. “In time, you will feel differently.”

Cal watched Darth Vader’s retreating back, the swirling cape and the shine of his helmet but all he could see was Cere’s agonized face, hear Trilla’s screams, feel the seething hatred and betrayal and hurt.

The stormtroopers pulled at Cal’s arms, but Cal was riveted to the spot. He thought of the vision he’d had in the temple all of those years ago, himself with a red lightsaber, dressed in Imperial blacks, and the revulsion boiled up inside of him and the next thing he knew the stormtroopers’ grips were gone, and he was on his hands and knees.

He was breathing hard, gasping. He could feel the Force at his fingertips, already there. He looked around, and saw one of the stormtroopers’ bodies, crumpled against the floor, a great dent in the metal wall. The other trooper was slumped at the base of the wall opposite, right beside the holding cell’s forcefield. He caught a brief glimpse of the Rebel fighters within, locked eyes with one and saw the fear in her eyes, and then Cal’s breath left his body again as an invisible grip caught his throat and hauled him into the air.

“You can be powerful, Jedi,” Vader said, and in that moment Cal knew that he’d been baited, though he couldn’t imagine why. “But you hold your fear so close. Did your master tell you of her time with the inquisitors?”

“Just kill me,” Cal managed to grit out against the force on his neck. He summoned all of his waning strength and threw it against Vader’s will, hoping to force his hand.

Vader hardly seemed to notice it. “I could take you as an apprentice,” he said. “I could help you turn that fear into strength. If you cooperate. I assure you, it will be preferable to what the emperor has in store for you.”

Cal twisted and kicked in the air, hands clawing at his throat, and was only vaguely aware of his knees hitting the ground before the world went dark.

#

In the dim, smoky interior of the cantina, Luke held a hand to his pounding temple and tried not to draw attention. Ben—Obi Wan was negotiating with a pilot, and Luke tried not to put his hands to his throat, though he felt that he must be choking beneath phantom hands. For a moment, he was so wildly afraid that he wanted to bolt from the table, all the way out of the room. He recognized distantly that the fear wasn’t his own.

While their prospective pilots conferred, Obi Wan laid a hand on Luke’s forearm. “I felt it too,” he said gently.

“What’s happening?” Luke whispered, heart racing. He pressed his palms flat against the table, focusing on the rough material to ground himself.

“Nothing we can do anything about now,” Obi Wan said, his expression grim.

“The Jedi,” Luke said.

Obi Wan nodded. “We can discuss later,” he said, just as Han Solo and Chewbacca turned back to them.

Han extended a rough hand and said, “We’ve got a deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Cal. Things‘ll turn around soon, I promise.


	5. Chapter 5

The cell door slid open, and a little black R2 unit trundled in.

Cal cleared his throat from his spot in the center of the floor. “Yes?”

The R2 unit burbled, then slid to the side to reveal a med droid, accompanied by a stormtrooper. The med droid had a long, thin needle in one of its spindly arms.

“Ah,” Cal said, and let his head settle back on the floor. There was no use trying to get up - a determined toddler could probably overpower him as he was right now. Everything ached - even his scalp and the tiny muscles behind his eyes. He’d never been so tired.

He didn’t fight as the stormtrooper knelt to take his hand and pushed back his jacket sleeve to expose his forearm. The droid hovered closer, and Cal grunted as the needle slid beneath his skin. He felt a clammy, cold sensation spread up his arm and down to his fingertips as the syringe slowly emptied into his bloodstream.

The stormtrooper released Cal’s hand. Cal pulled it in close to his chest and tried to focus on his breath, his center, grounding himself as best as he could. He could already feel himself breaking out in a sweat.

They pulled him to his feet, marched him to the interrogation chamber once more, and then by the time they were strapping him down to the table, his vision was beginning to blur.

Something moved in the edge of his vision, and he turned his head to try to look at it, but then there was a familiar click and the machine switched on.

When he came to himself again, Cere was there. Standing right in front of him, no stormtroopers to be seen. Cere, with her neat graying hair and her gentle sardonic smile, her arms folded, eyes concerned.

Cal felt such an intense, unfounded wave of fear at the sight of her that he almost screamed again. Instead, he gritted his teeth. “I know that’s not her,” he said. He was hallucinating.

She smiled at him so kindly that he wanted to cry, and then the machine switched on again.

When the pain faded back down to manageable levels again, his eyes focused somewhat to find her standing closer to him. “You’ve worked so hard,” she said. “You need to rest.” Light fingers touched his face, a thumb wiping away the sweat and tears from his cheek, the way she had on more than one occasion after a bad force echo.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He knew it wasn’t her. He was drugged. She was somewhere else, somewhere far away. She wasn’t here. She was safe.

He repeated that silently to himself and flinched as he heard her voice say, “Cal, look at me.”

He shook his head. He was drugged. She wasn’t here. She was safe. If she were really here, she’d be upset. She’d fight to help him. So this couldn’t be her.

“Look at me.” The voice was so close now, and Cal could feel his thoughts slipping away from him. He grasped after them and they trickled through his fingers, and he thought that this couldn’t be her, that he shouldn’t believe what he was hearing and seeing, but he couldn’t remember why. He looked into her eyes as the pain hit once more.

#

The plan had been to board the Millenium Falcon, travel to Alderaan, find the Rebellion, and hand over the plans. Easy enough. Sure, they would likely have the Empire looking for them—they’d already run into stormtroopers outside the cantina who had been clearly searching for the plans—but Obi Wan had been apparently hiding out from the Empire for decades, and Han and Chewie were clearly well-practiced at going places that people didn’t want them to. Luke was almost confident that he could be back at home by the end of the week.

The Empire’s presence on Tattooine broke that plan into pieces before they even got aboard the Falcon.

After sneaking their way out of the town, skirting Imperial troops and once again having to rely on Obi Wanfound themselves barred from entering the starship hangar where Han’s ship was being stored. The hangar overseer stopped them at the entrance, where a cluster of pilots and cargo managers milled about, talking into communicators and casting mutinous looks in the overseer’s direction.

“I’m sorry,” the overseer said to Han, at least with the decency to sound sincerely apologetic. “Imperial command. No ships are to leave the planet for the time being.”

“We’re in Hutt territory,” Han said. “Since when do we follow Imperial commands?”

The overseer shrugged. “I couldn’t say. But I’m sure this will not last for too long. You can all be on your way as soon as the command lifts.”

“I’ve got a timetable that I need to keep, pal,” Han was saying, all but poking the manager in the chest. He paused, frowned, then leaned over to Obi Wan and muttered, “You can’t do your whole—” rather than describe it, he opted to waggle his fingers mystically in the overseer’s direction.

“I’m afraid not,” Obi Wan said with a placid smile, and then grabbed Luke’s arm to pull him aside.

“Why not?” Luke said, once they were away from the crowd.

“Oh, there are too many eyes,” Obi Wan said, glancing back toward the queue of disgruntled pilots that had formed behind Han and were clearly hanging on his every word with the overseer. “If I fool one but draw the attention of a dozen more, I’ve hardly helped our situation.”

Luke nodded. That made sense. “So what are we going to do?”

Obi Wan shook his head. “I hardly know. I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this. I sense something is amiss.” He looked away, back toward Han to say something, perhaps to pull him away from the senseless argument, and Luke meant to follow, but then paused as he heard something that sounded like a person calling for help somewhere very far away.

Luke stood on his tiptoes, squinting over the crowd, and then he heard it again, someone calling for help, their voice muffled as if heard through several thick walls. He focused, trying to hear it better, trying to figure out what it was saying or where it was coming from, and then suddenly there was a sharp, strange pulling sensation in the center of him.

It was as if he’d touched a live wire. His heart raced and he felt the kind of fear settle deep in his chest that made him want to break into a sprint. To run from what, he couldn’t say.

But at the same time the fear felt distant, and he knew somehow that it didn’t really belong to him. There was a conflicting bodily sensation. He tasted someone else’s blood in someone else’s mouth, felt restraints on someone else’s wrists and constricting against their chest, but at the same timehe was far more strongly aware of the fact that he was still standing in the hangar, and of Obi Wan’s concerned grip on his arm.

“Luke,” Obi Wan was saying in his ear, his voice soft but urgent. “Luke, I sense what you’re sensing, but you need to turn your attention away. You don’t know how to protect yourself. Don’t reach out. It could be a trap.”

Luke managed a nod but, chest tight, found that he couldn’t turn away from it. He didn’t want to. He felt a presence in his head, saw it almost like a point of warm light, like a candle guttering in a strong draft. And it was beautiful, even though it was clearly struggling to keep alight. He focused on it, trying to make it out from the blurry sensation in his head and the pain in his body that wasn’t his, and the fear that wasn’t his, and the uncertainty that definitely _was_ his, and then the candle bloomed, its light stretching tentatively out to touch him and a voice said, in his head, “What—?”

“Who are you?” Luke said, though he could guess.

The light rippled in confusion. The pain was like a barrier between them, dulling their connection and clearly preventing coherent thought. With effort, there was a stir of clarity, and then the voice strengthened and said, almost desperately, ”No.”

“It’s—it’s okay,” Luke said, overwhelmed with the intensity of the sensations and emotions flooding him. “I’m here to help. I think.”

“Oh,” the voice said, briefly losing its lucidity beneath another wave of pain. And then, another sensation of straining, and with renewed intensity the voice said, “ _No_. No, you can’t be here. Go. _Go now_.” And then Luke was shoved away with such strength that he lost all sight of the light and was, for a moment, adrift.

And then—a heavy presence. Luke shied away from it instinctively. When it turned toward him, it burned. Something so hot with hate that just the touch of it against his mind was painful. It caught hold of him, and that hurt too.

Luke tried to pull away, but the presence held him tight.

“There you are,” the presence said, its voice deep and commanding. Familiar, almost, thought Luke was certain he’d never met anyone with a voice like that. “Tell me,” it said. “Who are you?”

“Let me go,” Luke hissed, feeling like a child, pulling uselessly against a much stronger grip.

“Tell me who you are, and I will,” the voice said, its grip tightening.

“Luke.” This voice was different, and it seemed almost to catch Luke’s other wrist and yank him away.

“Luke,” the new voice said again, and Luke recognized it. Obi Wan’s stern voice almost seemed to cut right through the center of him, and then the connection with the terrible presence was gone, and Luke was back in sunlight.

He stared out briefly through the cage of Obi Wan’s fingers, and then Obi Wan removed his hand from Luke’s face, and with that, the final bit of connection broke and Luke was alone in his mind again. 

Luke realized that he had his hands raised protectively over his face. He lowered them slowly, becoming aware in bits and pieces of the smell of engine oil and Obi Wan’s grip on his knee, and cool metal against his back. He was crouched against a wall in a corner of the shuttle bay, half-hidden from the main walkway by some crates.

On his right, Chewbacca, who had clearly been holding several concerned onlookers at bay, was now patting their shoulders and making reassuring rumbling sounds as he shuffled them bodily away. Farther off, Han was placating the clearly concerned overseer. “Kid’s got a medical condition,” he was saying. “It’s got to be treated right away. That’s why we’re trying to get him off planet. Terribly sad—”

Luke tuned him out and focused back on Obi Wan. “What—“ he said.

“Calm yourself, Luke,” Obi Wan said. “What did you see?”

Luke told him, watching Obi Wan’s expression harden as he spoke.

“That was very foolish, Luke,” Obi Wan said, after Luke finished speaking. Then, he made a considering face and said, “Don’t misunderstand me. It speaks well of you to be so driven by compassion.” He stood and held out a hand, which Luke took, and helped him to his feet. He straightened Luke’s clothing, pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed it against Luke’s cheek, the touch almost paternal. He pulled away and pressed the handkerchief into Luke’s hand. “But you must learn to temper that compassion with sense. We’ll have to be even more careful now.”

“I don’t understand,” Luke said.

“We can’t allow him to catch you,” Obi Wan said, and the next look that he leveled at Luke was almost haunted. Luke felt, for a moment, that Obi Wan wasn’t truly looking at him at all.

“But who is he?” Luke said. “And why would they want me?”

“That,” Obi Wan said, with a grimace, “was in all likelihood Darth Vader.” He glanced sidelong at Luke as he said that, and Luke felt a shiver run down his spine.

“The man who killed my father?”

Obi Wan nodded. “He’ll kill you too, if we aren’t careful.”

#

Cal sagged against the table. He felt wrung out, a husk, something left to decay somewhere moldy and foul.

Vader stood directly in front of him, his hand outstretched, finger and thumb almost touching Cal’s temples, the shiny black palm of his glove almost filling Cal’s vision. Beyond him, several stormtrooper bodies lay still and broken, the dents where their bodies had impacted high up on the wall.

Shame burned in his gut and built behind his eyes. This was the second time he’d allowed Vader to provoke him into losing control, not out of concern for others, but out of fear for himself. And almost as bad, he was certain that he’d played right into Vader’s hand. He didn’t know who he’d reached out to in the depths of his pain, or why they’d been so easy to reach, but he could sense Vader’s triumph.

“Your resolve weakens,” Vader said, calm in his satisfaction and certainty. He lowered his hand from Cal’s face.

Cal shook his head. He felt cold, his skin damp. Whatever they’d injected him with was wearing off, perhaps. “Your goals can’t be so certain,” he said, throat so raw it was almost numb, “if you have to resort to drugging me to accomplish them.”

“Certainly your Rebel army isn’t above sabotage and propaganda,” Vader said, unmoved. “No war is won entirely on the battlefield.”

“Would you call this winning?” Cal asked. If he’d had the strength or capacity to move, he might have gestured to indicate himself, his own sweat-soaked, failing body.

“Transformation requires pain,” Vader said, and judging by the jump of anger in his tone, Cal had touched a nerve.

“Is that what happened to you?” Cal said, then winced as he felt Vader’s rage flare. Cal’s barriers were almost entirely broken down. He felt them, saw them in his mind’s eye like the crumbled ruins of the walls of the old ruins on Bogano.

“Perhaps I ought to interrogate every surviving member of your crew.”

Cal swallowed. “They don’t know anything. Hurting them will accomplish nothing.”

“It may accomplish your compliance.”

“It won’t,” Cal said, knowing it was true and hating himself for it.

The expressionless mask watched him motionlessly for another long moment, and then Vader turned and swept out of the room. A moment later, Cal felt what little strength left in him fade with the last of his defiance, and he slipped into darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

The little droid, BD-1, had hardly moved or made a sound since their conversation back near Obi Wan’s home. He had walked with them when they had to move or ridden, surprisingly, Chewbacca’s shoulder when they needed to move quickly, but beyond that BD-1 seemed struck with a kind of mute apathy, his little view display lit up with a constant stream of swirling reds and oranges.

He listened to everything the organics said. He thought they had good plans. Mostly. But he also saw the way that these organics squabbled with each other, that this Han Solo and Chewbacca were here only for the credits, that the younger man Luke clearly had no idea how high the stakes were, or how dangerous.

But that was alright. BD-1 still had the plans in his drive. If the organics failed, he would take over if necessary.

#

Luke was still a little unsteady on his legs as they boarded the Millennium Falcon. He hadn’t quite felt back to normal ever since that last bout with the strange mental and physical connection—the Force, as Obi Wan kept referring to it.

“Why am I feeling it?” Luke whispered to Obi Wan once they were seated in the ship’s galley area. He didn’t know if it was really necessary to keep his voice lowered as they spoke about it, but Han and Chewbacca had both made it very clear that they didn’t want to hear about it. “I understand why this... Force, might be something that you connect to easily. But why am I feeling it, and so strongly?” It had been some hours since his last contact with this Jedi, this Cal Kestis who was apparently out there somewhere, suffering terribly,

Obi Wan hummed. “I can’t say for certain, of course, but I have some guesses.” He fell silent for a moment, then said, “I think this Jedi must be strong in the Force. Perhaps he has some strength in one of the empathetic skill sets—it would explain why he can create such strong connections, even when weakened.” He pursed his lips, then added, “And as for you, Luke. Well. Your father was the most naturally gifted Jedi I’ve ever known. I heard that man cry out because I’ve trained to notice such things. You heard him cry out, I can only assume, because he was loud enough and you were willing to listen.”

At that, the droid that had been perched, statue-like, on the table, unfolded to standing and warbled softly, questioning.

Luke grimaced. He hadn’t noticed BD-1 sitting there. If he had, he wouldn’t have spoken about it. The droid was clearly very attached to his master. It was cruel to let him know that his master was suffering.

Obi Wan glanced at Luke, then turned his attention to BD-1 and said, “Yes, we’ve had some contact with your master. I assume you know what that means. You’ve surely seen him use the Force.”

An affirmative beep, followed by an anxious cascade of notes, and Obi Wan pressed his lips together tightly for a long moment before answering, “Yes. He is a captive of the Empire.”

BD-1 offered a hesitant beep.

“He may,” Obi Wan allowed, his tone very gentle. “But he may live, as well. We cannot fathom how the future will unfold.”

BD-1’s next beep was accusatory.

“We aren’t, you’re right. It’ll be hard enough as it is to bypass the Imperial blockade to bring your message to the Rebellion. We simply can’t afford to risk a rescue mission. And you carried his message to us—you know as well as we do that he wasn’t asking us to come for him.”

For a long moment, BD-1 looked between Obi Wan and Luke, and then his little view screen was shimmering a sharp red static, and he hopped stiffly off of the table to walk to another part of the ship.

“Poor thing,” Luke said, aware that his own heart was torn at the thought of leaving the captive man for dead. He pushed that away. “Is there really nothing we can do?”

“I can think of nothing,” Obi Wan said, his expression unfathomably grim. “The best we can do for that man is complete his mission for him.”

As he said this, Han walked out of the cockpit, only to pull up short as he saw Luke and Obi Wan. “Geez,” he said. “Who died?”

Luke felt a sharp retort burning on his tongue, but Obi Wan put a settling hand on his arm and said to Han, “Nobody yet. How may we help you?”

Han looked between them, clearly aware that he’d slipped up somehow but also entirely uninterested in trying to restore the peace. Instead, he just shrugged and said, “We got an idea to get off-planet. But you’re not gonna like it.”

#

“This has gone on long enough.”

Cal roused himself enough to crack an eye open. “Which part?”

Vader, who had just entered the interrogation room for the first time in a while—Cal actually couldn’t say how long it had been. Hours? Months?—gestured at the console with a sharp wave, and the table’s panels drew back from Cal’s face, the surface inclining a bit so that Cal was mostly upright. “Don’t fool with me, Jedi. The plans are nowhere to be found on the planet.”

Cal, who had actually been dazed enough that he’d been perfectly sincere when he asked the question, stayed silent. A tiny place in the center of him fluttered with pride. BD-1 had actually done it. He’d escaped the Empire, and the plans with him. Maybe Cal’s impending death, and everyone on the crew, would actually mean something.

That thought rekindled a small spark of hope, and with it, a small measure of fortitude. He’d been so focused on his own fear, on what was going to happen to him, that he’d almost lost sight of why he was there. He wasn’t dead yet, after all. And even once he was, it wouldn’t stop BD-1 and Kenobi from reaching the Rebellion. Every moment that he distracted Vader from the pursuit must be a moment worth sacrificing for.

“I have other matters to attend to,” Vader said, and he was breathing hard, his respirator clicking harshly at the end of each inhale. “Now, I’ll ask you one more time, where did you send the plans?”

Cal swallowed. He was having trouble thinking straight, but in this moment, Vader felt different. His anger felt less controlled than usual. Impatient. “Emperor must be getting angry,” Cal said. “Are you taking too long?”

“Silence.” Vader stepped forward, and Cal felt a shudder race through him, Vader’s power pressing briefly down on him before releasing again. In the corner of Cal’s eye, he could see the stormtroopers shuffling back a few steps, and he chuckled, which hurt, surprising himself with the sound.

Vader stopped. He regarded Cal for a moment. “You think you’ve won,” he said finally. “Tell me. How important do you really think the Death Star is to me, or to my master, in the long run?”

Cal considered that—or, rather, he attempted to consider it, but his thoughts refused to assemble into any kind of useful configuration. Finally, he gave up and twitched one shoulder a tiny bit in lieu of a shrug. “I don’t know. Is anything important to you?”

There was a ringing silence, and then Vader said, “Someday, once you’ve accepted your place as my master’s apprentice, you’ll know how little that question matters.” He gestured at the stormtroopers, who approached the table warily. “In the meantime, there’s an entire crew of prisoners down the hallway that I’m fairly certain are important to you, at least in theory. Let’s go test it, shall we?”

The stormtroopers unlatched Cal’s legs, and then his arms and his torso.

Once free and on his feet, Cal swayed, and the stormtrooper shifted to brace him. Cal gripped the trooper’s forearm automatically to steady himself, and then, with a flash of blinding white light, he was somewhere else entirely. He was flat on his back in an open field on a smoky night, the stench of burning things in his nose, a searing hole in the center of him, blaster fire streaking above him, staring at the still white helmet of the dead trooper beside him. He wanted to go home. He didn’t want to die.

Cal must have cried out, maybe he used the Force to push away, but then he was free of the echo, and the stormtrooper in his second-hand dead man’s armor let go of him.

Cal staggered. He dropped to his knees. He pressed his hands to either side of his head, trying to hold at bay the urge to scream or vomit. He automatically tried to use the tactics that always helped to ground himself in the present, only to feel a great well of despair threatening to overtake him. The present situation was hardly an escape.

Vader’s boots appeared in Cal’s vision. Cal couldn’t bring himself to lift his head, and instead focused on breathing. Vader said something to the troopers that Cal was too dazed to understand, and then someone grabbed his left hand and worked it free from its glove. He tried to close his fingers, but the stormtrooper just pried them painfully open, and then turned it and pressed it firmly against the icy metal latch of one of the interrogation table’s leg restraints.

A flash of white—and then, agony. Two-fold. Ten-fold. So many voices screaming, crying, so many sensations overwhelming what little defense he had left and pouring into his mind. He was a Rebel fighter. He was a disobedient trooper. He was a spy. He was a child, alone and confused and crying for his father and his wrists were too small for the restraints. On and on and on, each viewpoint layering on top of the last until he was sure he would split into pieces.

And then, abruptly, the pain stopped, and with it came a ringing silence, as if he’d been in a room of voices and then fallen suddenly deaf. Cal knew he’d been screaming. He opened his eyes, briefly unable to remember where he was, hardly able to remember who he was.

Vader was crouched down beside him. It took Cal several bewildered seconds to recognize him, to understand the terror that his body was all too ready to recall for him. Vader held out a gloved hand, palm up.

Cal reflexively curled his hands in against his chest.

“Psychometry,” Vader said. “That’s a rare gift.”

Cal said nothing. He couldn’t have formed words if he’d wanted to, and he truly didn’t want to. He couldn’t think of a single word to say that could express the rage that the multitude of suffering souls had built up within him. Perhaps no such words existed.

An additional trooper stepped into the room, a Rebel fighter helmet tucked beneath one arm. Vader took hold of Cal’s hand at the wrist, the touch oddly gentle, but then an invisible pressure was forcing Cal’s fingers open, and the smooth, cool dome of the helmet was pressed against his palm.

There was a blinding flash, and then—terror. Grief. They’d failed, and everyone that he was meant to lead was going to die. This man, this Vader was going to kill him. He couldn’t breathe. His feet dangled from the ground, he could see nothing, his neck was breaking, he could feel it, hear it, the sound was deafening, he was so afraid, he was dying, he was dying, oh gods—

Another flash of light, and Cal was once again slumped at the base of the interrogation table. Vader’s face was close to his own, the glossy black spaces where his eyes should be boring into Cal’s own.

Cal closed his eyes.

“Shall I send for another?” Vader asked, his modulated voice soft. “We’ve no shortage of Rebel possessions.”

“Please,” Cal said. No other words would come. He could still feel the cursed proximity of Rez’s helmet, the captain’s last moments at Vader’s hand, crying out to him from where it lay upturned and abandoned beside him.

“No?” Vader said. “Then will you cooperate?”

Cal choked on a sob. He shook his head, no.

Vader’s enormous glove was still wrapped around Cal’s wrist. Cal tried to pull away. To his dim surprise, Vader released him.

“Sir.” Across the room, the door was open, and an Imperial officer stood, eyes pointed carefully ahead, not acknowledging Cal with so much as a glance. “We’ve captured a ship. They were preparing to jump to hyperspace but couldn’t escape our tractor beam.”

“Is there anyone on board?” Vader asked quietly.

“Well, no, sir. We’re searching the ship currently.”

Cal curled in on himself as Vader stood.

“Put the Jedi back on the table,” Vader said, gesturing to the stormtroopers. “Wait outside the door until I return. Let no one else enter.”

As Vader turned to go, Cal didn’t know why he did it, but he stretched out a hand and grazed the heel of Vader’s boot with his bare fingertips. There was a blinding flash, and then—rage. Grief. A pain that was difficult to process until he realized that he had no arms or legs, they weren’t numb but gone entirely, replaced with the dull sensation of bionics, and he wanted to scream not from the pain but from the grief and the betrayal, and—

Vader jerked his foot out of Cal’s reach, and the connection with the echo broke. Cal shook his head a little at the strange dichotomy of the raw grief that he’d experienced and the monolithic, cool anger of the man in front of him.

“Who’s Padme?” Cal said.

Before the name had even fully left his mouth, it seemed, Vader’s lightsaber was flaring to blinding life just a bare couple of centimeters from his face, and Cal was, just for a moment, absolutely certain that he’d finally pushed the right button and Vader was going to kill him then and there. He felt the searing heat of it radiating against his cheek, and with that a wry spark of satisfaction.

“You will regret that,” was all Vader finally said, after a long stretch of mechanical breaths, and then he was setting the lightsaber back on his belt, and he was turning to leave the room with another word.

Cal was sure he would regret it. But for now, he held that tiny triumph close as the stormtroopers picked him up off of the ground and pressed him back into the restraints.


	7. Chapter 7

“You’re right,” Luke said, as the shield alarms began to blare. “I don’t like your plan.”

“Shut it, kid,” Han said, furiously flipping switches, stretching out of his seat to reach buttons on the ceiling. Beside him, Chewbacca rumbled something, and Han threw up his hands and said, “You can shut it too.”

Luke ducked down to peer up out of the view screen. Ahead of them, an Imperial destroyer drifted above Tatooine’s horizon like the great lizard-like birds of prey that hunted the sands near Luke’s home.

“Why aren’t we jumping to hyper?” Luke said.

“Tractor beam,” Han said. “Caught hold the moment we left atmosphere.”

“Bad luck,” Obi Wan said, and it was true. Just a few minutes earlier, they’d punched out of the ship hangar ceiling at top speed—part one of Han’s elegant plan—and they’d intended to hop to hyperspace as soon as it was physically possible to do so. The destroyer had caught them just as Chewbacca’s hand was on the hyperspace switch.

Perched on Chewbacca’s shoulder, BD-1 gave a shrill series of chirps.

“That’s the destroyer that caught your ship?” Obi Wan said, and BD-1 gave a single note of confirmation.

“Why are they still here?” Luke said, stomach sinking down past his feet.

Han paused in his button pushing to squint at them. “Don’t tell me they’re here for you two.”

“I can’t say for sure,” Obi Wan said. “Though it’s more than possible. Vader’s not the kind of man to let things go.” He glanced sidelong at Luke who frowned back, nonplussed.

Han pinched the bridge of his nose, then sighed and said, “Okay. New plan.”

Plan Number Two consisted of cramming themselves into a smuggling hold, letting the ship get captured, and just kind of figuring out a way forward from there.

To Luke’s honest surprise, Plan Two worked much better than Plan One. They took a couple of stormtroopers by surprise, put on their armor, and soon found themselves walking down the center of the destroyer’s otherwise empty loading bay.

Soon they were in a side room, and Obi Wan was leaving to go disable the tractor beam, alone.

“But I want to go with you,” Luke said, as Obi Wan stepped out into the hallway. He knew old Ben had been some great knight at some point, but that was in the past, and as he stood before Luke now in his drab brown robe, he looked terribly old, and maybe a little frail.

Obi Wan put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and said, “Our paths must diverge here, Luke. Remember, the Force is always with you. Listen to it, and to yourself.” With a final squeeze, he stepped away from Luke, and the door whooshed shut between them.

Luke turned back to face the others in the room. BD-1 was still patched in to the ship’s systems, schematics and reports flashing rapidly across the screen as he searched for who knew what. Han stood in the far corner of the room, an impressive scowl on his face, arms crossed, while Chewbacca paced around, squinting at monitors and eyeing the different buttons on the consoles.

“You know the old guy’s not gonna make it,” Han said.

“Don’t start,” Luke said, jabbing a finger in Han’s direction. Han raised a hand in surrender, and there were a few beats of quiet.

Just as Luke was beginning to resign himself to a long wait, they all jumped as BD-1 burst into a volley of rabid-fire chirps.

Luke struggled to make sense, but finally got the gist and felt a swell of hope rise up within him, and at the same time a sharp, anxious constriction in the center of his chest. “You found Cal Kestis?” he said. He’d been trying to avoid thinking about him, too afraid to know that he was already dead, or worse that he was alive but out of reach. “He’s still alive?”

“Wait, Cal who?” Han said behind him.

Luke ignored him. “Then you know where he is?” he said, and BD-1 chirped an affirmative. “Well then we have to go get him, of course.” At that, BD-1 chattered excitedly, doing a couple of little dancing jumps in place.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Han said. He caught Luke’s shoulder and pulled him around to face him. “Who are we talking about now?”

“There’s a prisoner here, a Jedi by the name of Cal Kestis,” Luke said. He leaned over BD-1 to see the map on the screen. It looked like the brig wasn’t actually very far from where they were now. “He’s with the Rebellion. We have to go help him.”

“The Rebellion,” Han repeated. He grimaced expressively. “You’re telling me you’re trying to run a rescue mission for the Rebels now? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Luke rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re an Empire sympathizer.”

“Of course not.” Han looked around, as if someone might pop their head in through the door to offer him some backup. “But you can’t honestly expect me to go risk my hide for some guy I’ve never met. For an organization that, quite frankly, hasn’t accomplished shit as far as I know. You didn’t pay me enough for that.”

Luke opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head. “You know what?” He pulled his helmet back on over his head. “Stay here if you want.” He leaned down a bit, and BD-1 hopped from the console to his shoulder, his little mag-lock feet clicking as they adhered to the armor on Luke’s back.

Han threw up his hands. “Chewie, are you seeing this?” At that Chewbacca rumbled something. “Yeah—,” Han said, then gave an almost cartoonish double-take and said, “Whose side are you on, furball?”

Chewbacca rumbled again, and then reached over to grab a pair of handcuffs that hung from the utility belt of one of the fallen troopers in the room.

“Good idea,” Luke said, taking the cuffs and then closing them loosely over Chewie’s proffered hands.

Han watched this, jaw working silently several times before he finally pressed his hands to his face and said, “Alright, fine.” He snatched his stolen helmet from the console, then jabbed a finger at Chewbacca and said, “Traitor,” before opening the door and stomping back out into the hallway.

Luke grinned and followed.

The interior of the Imperial ship was almost a labyrinth, but BD-1 chirped directions as they went, hopping down a couple of times to let them through locked doorways. They hardly passed anyone, and the troopers they did pass saw the uniforms and Chewbacca in cuffs and asked no questions.

Finally, they reached a short hallway lined with doors. On on side, there was a great red force field acting as a cell door, and Luke could dimly see a group of maybe a dozen figures inside. At the end of the hall, a smaller set of doors were flanked by a pair of stormtroopers standing guard.

Mind racing but coming up with nothing much, Luke walked as evenly and calmly as he could, approaching the guards who were now straightening to attention, hands on their blasters. As they passed the cell full of people, several of them stood and eyed him and Han suspiciously. One called out to Chewbacca in Shyriiwook, which Chewbacca responded to, looking surprised.

“What’s this?” One of the stormtroopers said, once Luke and his cohort were just a couple of paces away from the door.

“We’ve got a new prisoner,” Luke said, trying to sound confident but certain that they must hear the quaver of uncertainty.

The guards looked at each other, then at the trio. “Identification?”

“Uh,” Luke said eloquently, and then Chewbacca stepped forward and brought his cuffed fists down hard on top of the trooper’s helmet. At the same moment, Han brought his blaster around and took the other guard down with a clean shot through the side.

BD-1 hopped down from Luke’s shoulder and keyed a few codes into the door. It began to unlock with a series of resounding clicks.

“Is this it?” Luke asked. BD-1 shook his little body negatively and chirped that Cal’s cell was back down the hallway, near the cell with the forcefield.

“Okay, you go get him,” Luke said. He was sure that BD-1 was the one Cal would want to see first. “I’ll check over here.” BD-1 chirped agreement and transferred over to Chewbacca’s shoulder, and they turned back down the hallway. “Check the other cells too.”

Han stayed at Luke’s side, blaster raised, ready for whatever was on the other side. The door gave a final stream of clicks, then whooshed open, revealing a dark room and a large, odd piece of machinery within, the side of it casting out long, jagged shadows in the harsh white light that spilled in through the open door. There was no other light in the room.

Luke squinted into the gloom until his eyes made out the shape of an open hand, limp fingertips, and then the rest of the scene assembled itself properly into a still figure slumped awkwardly, pinned partially upright by thick restraints like an insect on a display board.

“Oh hell,” Han muttered somewhere back by the doorway.

Luke’s heart pulsed in his fingertips. He stepped slowly into the room. The person on the table looked so still. For a moment, Luke was sure he was dead.

But then the body roused a bit, perhaps at the sound of Luke’s footsteps, and Luke could breathe again. The person tilted their head away from Luke and from the light. Their hands—one gloved, the other not—curled into tight fists at their sides.

Luke rushed forward, taking in the rest of the room as he went— the blinking console in front of him, the strange metal panels that stuck out from the table, the odd presence of an oblong helmet upturned by his feet, and a single glove crumpled up on the floor near the table. He set his blaster down beside the helmet, propped against the base of the table. He wondered why there were so many prisoners on this particular ship. Or did Imperial ships always have holds full of captives, people stolen from their lives and swallowed by the will of the Empire.

The person stiffened when Luke came close. They didn’t look at him. Though their eyes were open, their gaze was steady on some point far in the distance, almost serene. When Luke reached out to start working at the restraint on one of the wrists, the captive flinched.

“Sorry,” Luke said, struggling with the latch and willing his hands to be less clumsy in the bulky armored gloves. He glanced up to see the person looking down at him, most of their face still cast in shadow.

“You’re not a stormtrooper,” the person said, their faint, rasping voice reminiscent of the sound that a boot makes as it sinks into deep sand.

Luke laughed a little. “No, I’m not,” he said, but then he registered a tightness in the person’s jaw and something that felt like the strains of desperation, and he rushed to reiterate, “I’m not. A stormtrooper.” He stepped back and pulled the helmet off. Immediately, the sharp smell of electrified metal and burning and sour vomit and sweat filled his nose. He bent to set the helmet on the floor, then straightened to let the person see his face.

“I’m Luke Skywalker,” he said. “I’m here to help you.” He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from where it had plastered itself to his forehead with sweat beneath the helmet. He wasn’t feeling terribly heroic under the captive’s flat stare. “Well, actually I’m here because our ship got captured. But hey, might as well try and get everyone out if we can, right?” He tried a smile.

“Oh.” The person swallowed, throat clicking audibly. Their lips tightened in what might have been an attempt to smile back. “Cal.”

“Cal,” Luke repeated stupidly, a spike of something sharp running through his gut. He searched the captive’s face for some semblance of the bold, confident man from BD-1’s holo recording. Perhaps he could blame the darkness for not recognizing him, but there was also a kind of dullness that molded this man’s face into something entirely unlike the man in the holo. As if some internal light had dimmed.

Luke opened his mouth—to say what, he wasn’t sure—but then snapped it closed as, with a soft snick, the door to the hallway slid shut and the room plunged into darkness.

Luke held very still. There was some clattering on the far side of the room, the sound of a person in full trooper armor falling flat on his ass.

“Han?” Luke called.

“Door closed,” Han said, unnecessarily. Luke could hear him grunting, probably trying to force the door back open.

Luke swore. “Find a light?” he called. There was no point wasting energy fighting a door’s hydraulics.

“Working on it,” Han said, his voice moving now, likely feeling along the walls.

Luke’s mind was racing. The door shutting like that couldn’t be a coincidence. The Empire knew they’d escaped the Falcon. Did they know exactly where they were? Had they shut down only the cell blocks, or had every room on the destroyer gone into lockdown? Stars, they were idiots for splitting up. And he was a complete idiot for agreeing to Han’s terrible plan to get them off-planet, for thinking they could possibly outsmart the Empire.

Just as he was really starting to lay into himself, Luke heard Han give a triumphant “ha!” and then piercing lights seared to life in the ceiling and the room was washed in flat white.

“Great,” Luke said, blinking hard, eyes watering. He saw Han starting to work at a console near the door. Luke left him to it. He turned back to Cal, saying, “Let’s get you out of here, huh?” then scrambled to say, “Whoa. Hey, you okay?” because Cal’s eyes were squeezed shut, his breathing rapid and shallow.

He reached out to touch Cal’s shoulder and said, “Hey, look at me. It’s okay,” but if anything, Luke’s touch and his words made Cal’s face twist even further. Up close, Luke could see the bruising on Cal’s face and throat, the tell-tale scorched patch of a blaster bolt in the shoulder of his jacket, the swollen red skin around his eyes, the blood beneath his nose.

“I hear blasters,” Han said, his fingers flying over the keyboards.

Luke did too. He stripped off his gloves and returned to the restraint on Cal’s closest wrist. Without the extra bulk of the gloves, this time it took only a moment for him to find the catch and pop it open.

As soon as Luke had worked the thick strap loose, Cal’s newly freed arm twisted and he caught hold of Luke’s wrist in a weak grip. He squeezed, as if testing the reality of it, and when Luke looked up, Cal was watching him again, expression raw with something that Luke didn’t know how to read.

“It’s okay,” Luke said. On instinct, he turned his wrist to take Cal’s hand gently. He gave it a light squeeze, careful of the deep purpling in the skin at the exposed wrist. “I’m here,” he said simply. He remembered the profound confusion and fear from their connection, the sense of unreality. “Okay? I’m here, I swear.”

Cal looked down at their hands, then back up at Luke’s face, and then nodded once, tightly.

“Okay,” Luke said again, then let go and got back to work on the next strap, keenly aware of the weight of Cal’s gaze on the top of his head.

The rest of the restraints were easy after that. When the last strap was free from around Cal’s chest, Luke gripped him under an elbow and helped him out of the table’s incline. Cal wavered, then leaned on Luke heavily. He was taller than Luke, and that along with the weight of the stormtrooper armor had Luke staggering. After a moment’s struggle Luke called out to Han, “A little help?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Han said, giving the console another couple of perfunctory smacks with his hand before abandoning it and moving to come help. He only made it a couple of steps, though, before the door slid open again to reveal several stormtroopers, their guns raised.

Han, still out of sight by the door, ducked behind a machine. Luke could see him in his periphery, frantically waving at Luke to get down. But Luke stood there in the open like an idiot, frozen with his shoulder propped up under Cal’s arm, his hand around his waist, and then Cal hooked his foot around Luke’s and shoved against him and they hit the ground together, the console blocking them from the pair of stormtroopers in the doorway.

Blaster bolts streaked overhead. Luke thought he could hear Han’s blaster too. Beside him, Cal was on his knees, leaning heavily against the base of the console, his leg still tangled with Luke’s.

“Thanks,” Luke said, reaching across him to grab his blaster.

“Sure.” Cal’s eyes were shut, and he seemed to be focusing very hard on staying upright.

Luke peeked his head up over the console just as Han got a shot into one of the troopers, and Luke squeezed a couple of shots into the other one, his heart pounding in his chest. He’d never shot anybody before. It felt too easy.

“Kid,” Han called, and Luke shook himself free of that thought. He held out a hand down to Cal and said, “Come on.”

Cal made a heartfelt “ugh” sound, as if getting up from where he sat were the exact last thing that he wanted to do, but held out an arm and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. Luke noticed a slight hesitation, like Cal was trying to figure out how not to take his hand, and even now Cal’s hands were curled into fists. Luke wondered if there was something wrong with them—maybe they’d been damaged somehow. With all of that bruising around his wrists, it wasn’t unlikely.

Han finally made his way over. To his credit, he lifted his helmet and gave Cal a tight smile before pulling it back down and taking Cal’s other arm.

After a couple of dragging steps, Cal managed to get his feet under him, and the three of them made their awkward way out into the empty corridor.

“Where is everybody?” Luke said. There was no sign of Chewbacca or BD-1. The cell that had held all of those other prisoners now lay empty, the force field disabled with scorch marks on the paneling that indicated BD-1’s handiwork.

“Chewie!” Han hissed, as if the Wookiee might be hiding just out of sight. “Where are ya, you big furball?”

“They left,” Cal muttered, squinting as if looking into a blinding light, his voice barely audible above the echoing clanking of their stormtrooper boots. “They’re—” He gestured vaguely off to the left with his chin. “That way.”

“Magic.” Han muttered it like a curse, and Cal chuckled breathily.

“Vader’s distracted,” Cal announced quietly, after a few more steps brought them to the next door. It was open, more scorching on the paneling. “He’s not—blocking me. From the Force.”

Ben, Luke thought, and something deep in the pit of his stomach told him he was right. The old man was keeping Vader busy so they could get away. Aloud, he just said, “Let’s keep moving.”

They continued their slow way through the corridors, rounding each corner with their blasters ready only to be greeted only by more long, empty stretches of white walls.

It was only when they reached the final chamber outside of the ship hangar that the sound of blasters and shouting reached them. The blast doors were open onto the giant room beyond, and Luke could see red and green blaster fire streaking past.

Chewbacca’s roar soared above the din and without another word Han rushed forward with his blaster drawn, leaving Luke to bear the brunt of Cal’s weight. They reached the doorway just as the sound of blasters went ominously quiet.

Luke was just deciding to poke his head around the door to see what was happening when Han called out, “Come on out kid, quick.”

Once in the hangar, Luke breathed out a sigh of relief at the sight of Han and Chewbacca by the Falcon. A group of people, who Luke assumed must be the other captives, gathered at one of the Imperial troop transports. Those who were standing had blasters that had clearly been stolen off of troopers, and were helping to move their injured comrades onto the transport shuttle. The doors that led to the center of the ship lay open across the hangar, the bodies of fallen stormtroopers strewn around them.

“Come on,” Han said again, rushing forward to help Luke with Cal again. “There’ll be more of them any second.”

“We can’t leave Ben,” Luke said.

“Kid,” Han said, clearly torn between sympathy and exasperation. “We can’t wait for him. He might not even be—” he trailed off, and Luke scowled at him.

“Just—” Luke started, but gritted his teeth and continued with forced calm. “Let’s just get Cal onto the ship at least.” Once he had Cal safe, he’d be able to try and track down Ben. He’d grab BD-1—who he’d caught sight of over with the other captives, helping them hack the transport and who likely hadn’t even seen Cal yet—get the droid to show him where the tractor beam core was, and from there Luke could follow Ben’s footsteps. He owed it to Ben to at least try.

They were almost to the Falcon, and he was just solidifying the plan in his head when a thunderous crashing sound, like a blown transistor, or lightning, echoed through the hangar. Luke turned his head toward the sound just in time to see two lightsabers crashing together, producing that terrible noise again. One of them was held by Ben, and the other was in the hands of a looming, masked person dressed in swirling black.

Ben and the cloaked figure—who must be Vader—traded a quick series of blows, but Ben was clearly tiring. He glanced over in Luke’s direction, and even over that distance Luke felt that they’d locked gazes, and his blood turned to ice.

“Ben!” Luke screamed, because he could feel it in his heart and see it on Ben’s face that the old man had accepted death. He watched as Ben lowered his guard, as Vader raised his lightsaber high above his head, read to make the killing blow, as Ben bowed his head. But the killing strike never fell.

Instead, a strange orange light erupted from Vader’s side, piercing through his thigh and upper arm, accompanied by a loud cracking sound and a cloud of steam. Luke’s eyes couldn’t make sense of it until he recognized the shape of a lightsaber hanging from Vader’s belt, this one apparently double-bladed. The saber had flared to life seemingly of its own accord.

At the same time, Cal suddenly dropped like a stone, hanging heavily enough that Luke was dragged to the ground with him. Luke assumed Cal had finally passed out, but when he looked down, Cal’s eyes were open. He watched Vader with a sharp intensity, blood running from his nose and painting his lips and teeth red. His bare hand stretched out in Ben and Vader’s direction and the orange saber twisted, puncturing partway into Vader’s torso and cleanly removing Vader’s leg at the thigh, exposing sparking wires and sending out a cloud of sickly black smoke. Darth Vader toppled to the floor like a droid with its wires cut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait. Thank you for all of the lovely comments! Each and every one made my day.


	8. Chapter 8

Cal’s felt the edges of him crumpling inward. A black void yawned at the edges of his vision, one that he was sure would rise up and swallow him if he did what he wanted desperately to do, which was to lie down and close his eyes and never open them again.

He fought that urge. He focused on the old man who had been fighting Vader, vision warping strangely, as if he were looking down the stretch of a long, dark hallway.

The old man stood as if in a dream, his lightsaber deactivated, the handle loose in his grip. One of his hands lifted as he watched Vader fall, as if he meant to reach out and catch him.

But this time, when Skywalker screamed the old man’s name—his mouth directly beside Cal’s ringing ear—the old man finally seemed to come to his senses. He looked in Skywalker’s direction, and then his open expression hardened and he turned back to where Vader now lay twisted on the ground.

Echoes tended to leave Cal with a strong sense of a person’s proprioception, so Cal still had a pretty good idea of where Vader’s physical body ended and the implants began. He knew that his saber hadn’t actually hit anything vital, just machinery. He’d only damaged a container, easily replaced.

The old man must have known this too. His lightsaber flared back to life. He raised it over Vader’s body and brought it down, a killing blow that never made contact—at that same moment, Vader’s undamaged arm lifted and the old man was hurled backward, out of the hallway and onto the hangar floor.

Skywalker called out to the old man again, and this time Cal could focus enough to hear him yell, “Leave him!” as the old man stumbled upright. 

The doors to Vader’s hallway slid shut and a tide of stormtroopers poured out of a side entrance on the adjacent wall of the hangar. The old man stood for just a moment, helpless anger in every line of his body before he turned on his heel and ran back toward Cal and Skywalker and the ship.

The Wookiee and the ship’s pilot were taking shots at the stormtroopers, drawing some of their fire.

“We gotta go,” Skywalker said, his voice cracking. “Come on.”

It took a moment for Cal to realize that Skywalker was talking to him, and then another to recognize that they were both on the ground and Skywalker was trying to pull him upright. Cal didn’t remember falling.

I can’t, Cal tried to say, but nothing came out. He couldn’t feel his legs. He barely even felt the pain that he knew had been there minutes before. He mostly felt numb, and when Luke hooked his hands up under Cal’s armpits and began to drag him, he was aware that it hurt, especially where Skywalker’s grip pressed down on the blaster wound in his shoulder—was maybe even aware of making a sound from the pain of it, and of Skywalker apologizing over and over as he hauled them both up the ramp into the ship. But it also felt very distant and unimportant, the pain and the apologies and the blaster fire, and he let his eyes slip shut so that he could drift in the darkness instead.

When he opened them again, it was to a flurry of motion and sound. They were in a smaller space, a dingy white ship interior. He was sitting, slumped, on a chair, or a bench maybe. Skywalker was shooting out of a closing porthole while the old man jabbed at a console on the wall. One of the light panels in the ceiling was dark—not shot out, just... out.

“The Rebel ship’s made it out of the hangar,” Luke called as the porthole sealed shut with a hiss. Hearing that, Cal grinned, feeling light and dizzy.

With a great shudder, their own ship took flight. There was an odd, twanging ping-ping sound that Cal identified as blaster fire striking the hull. He let his chin fall to his chest.

“Did you get the tractor beam?” he heard Skywalker ask the old man. Cal couldn’t find the strength to lift his eyes from where they’d settled on the table in front of him, but the old man must have nodded because Skywalker heaved a great sigh and then said something else that Cal didn’t catch.

The ship dipped and rattled. In another room, the Wookiee and the pilot were yelling something about TIE fighters and a turret blaster. The entire ship shook violently. Skywalker dashed out of the room, and Cal was left alone with the old Jedi.

“A great deal more excitement than I’m accustomed to these days,” the old man murmured, perhaps to Cal, perhaps to himself. The Jedi’s footsteps drew closer, and Cal felt his breath catch his his throat. His hands curled into fists of their own accord. The old man’s steps faltered. When he spoke again, it was very quietly, “Ah, I wasn’t aware you were awake. You’ve nothing to fear from me.”

Cal managed a tiny nod, though his eyes still refused to lift from the table. If he kept looking at it, he could keep the void at bay. The table had a checkered gaming board built into it, a game Cal recognized but had never learned. He focused on one of the white squares, trying to make it into an anchor, trying to settle himself back in his body.

“May I help you?” The old man asked gently. He held a hand out where Cal could see it, the offer clear—he could use the Force to help anchor Cal, something Master Tapal had done more than once when Cal had overreached as a child.

It would probably help. But the thought of one more presence in his head, even that of someone who seemed to be an ally, made him want to vomit, and he shook his head sharply. The rest of him took up the motion until every part of him shook. The old man’s hand retracted.

“Here,” the old man said a moment later, and a canteen was held to Cal’s lips. He tried to drink it, but his mouth tasted like blood, and his throat was so bruised and raw that he coughed and spluttered, tears squeezing from the corners of his eyes. He doubled over, pressed his pounding head to his knees, and tried not to vomit as the ship tipped and swayed again and the old man took hold of Cal’s shoulders to steady him. He wanted to laugh, he wanted to scream, he wanted to shove the old man’s hands off of him, and he had the strength to do none of it.

“Breathe,” the old man said, lifting his hands away from Cal as soon as the ship stabilized. “It’ll pass.” There was a clattering from up near the cockpit. “Yes,” the old man said. “We got him, little one. Come see.”

And then, an achingly familiar chatter reached Cal’s ears. A moment later, a familiar weight was clambering up Cal’s leg and BD-1 wriggled into the narrow gap between Cal’s chest and knees. He filled the space like a fresh breath.

“BD.” The name was somewhere between a laugh and a sob in Cal’s throat. He managed to bring a hand up and rested it on BD-1’s little body. The gentle echoes of home and safety rushed up to meet him, and even as the ship twisted and swooped again, he finally, gratefully, slipped into an empty sleep.

#

“That,” Luke said, clambering out of the blaster turret, his shoulders aching from getting tossed around like a screw in a turbine, “Really isn’t something I need to do again anytime soon.” They’d been followed by a handful of TIE fighters that had dogged the Falcon all the way out of Tatooine’s orbit and into interplanetary space. Luke had managed to pick them off, one by one, though judging by the sound that the engines were making, he could only assume that the Falcon had taken damage as well. At least they’d made it into hyperspace.

Chewie roared something that sounded approving and stretched down a hand. Luke took it and laughed as Chewie hauled him bodily out of the turret passage.

As Luke made his way back to the Falcon’s central room, he pried the stormtrooper armor from his arms and chest, grateful for the cool, circulated air against his sweat-drenched undershirt. He reached the central room at the same time as Han, who was similarly shucking his armor.

Obi Wan was hunched at the table, his chin resting on his hands. His eyes were closed, meditating perhaps. It might have been a peaceful image, except that he looked older than Luke had ever seen him.

At his side, Cal Kestis took up the rest of the bench, his body stretched out horizontally, his head pillowed on Obi Wan’s folded robe. BD-1 was folded up on his chest, his blinking display pressed against the fingers of Cal’s ungloved hand, his body rising and falling with his human’s every breath.

“So,” Han said. He kept his voice low, at least. “That’s our guy?”

“That’s our guy,” Luke repeated. All of the exhilaration from the fight leached away at the sight of Cal’s battered face. It left him feeling strangely hollow. To Obi Wan, he said, “How is he?”

“In need of medical attention,” Obi Wan said, finally opening his eyes and looking up. He ran a wry eye over Han and Luke, taking in their sweaty, ruffled states. “Have we escaped mortal peril?”

“For now,” Luke said. He turned to Han. “Do you have a med bay?”

Han scoffed. “Sure. Right next to the penthouse suite.”

“Han.”

Han shrugged, but sobered. “What do you expect, kid? I mean—” He turned a small circle, as if considering his options, then left the room muttering, “I guess we have a medkit around here somewhere.”

After Han was out of earshot, Luke scrutinized Obi Wan’s face a little more closely. “Are you alright?”

Obi Wan waved off Luke’s concern and sighed. “Yes, Luke. I—” he trailed off, as if lost in thought. He was silent for a moment, and just as Luke was about to shake him or something, he roused and said, “There is much to consider.” That said, he sank back into his stupor and responded to nothing else that Luke said.

Chewie ducked into the room. He growled something that Luke didn’t understand, but made his meaning clear when he leaned down and bundled Cal into his arms, lifting him easily.

There were only so many sleeping quarters on the ship, and so Luke led Chewie to the room that Luke had tentatively claimed—where he’d at least left what few belongings he had. It happened to be in the smallest side room, and it had clearly originally been a storage room, and only passingly refitted as a bunk room. It was just a few paces across, most of the floorspace taken up by a narrow bed and a simple metal shelf, the ceiling low enough that Chewbacca had to duck as he lowered Cal to the bunk.

The medkit that Han eventually scrounged up was only barely better than nothing. No bacta injections or nutripacks, only a mild bacta ointment and bandages. There were painkillers at least, though not strong ones.

“We’ve gotta go work on the engines,” Han said, hovering awkwardly in the doorway. “You, uh, need anything else?”

Luke shook his head, though he honestly needed plenty of things—a meal, a bath, a hug. Someone who actually knew what to do with a medkit.

“You know, we could really use a droid, if you feel like helping,” Han said pointedly before he left the room, to which BD-1 gave a curt, dismissive chirp, settling onto the mattress beside Cal, once again pressing his casing against Cal’s open palm.

“He doesn’t mean anything by it,” Luke told BD-1, who chirped again, unplacated.

Luke looked over his meager supplies, then at BD-1. “You wouldn’t happen to have any med protocols, would you?” He’d ask Obi Wan, but the old man seemed to have planted himself permanently on the common room bench. Even when Luke had shaken him, he hadn’t opened his eyes.

BD-1 beeped uncertainly, something about healing stims.

“Not sure we’d want to use those even if we had them.” Stimpacks were hard on a body, and this guy didn’t look like he had much more energy to give.

In his sleep, Cal was extremely still. Luke was again struck with the impression that he was looking at a dead man, even though he could see the shallow rise and fall of Cal’s chest.

This man had saved Obi Wan from Darth Vader. Hell, he’d pulled Luke out of the line of blaster fire just moments after being freed from that machine. Luke wondered what Vader had done to him. For a moment, the memory of the pain and fear he’d felt through the Force threatened to engulf him. He scrubbed at his eyes and tried not to think about it.

“I don’t know where to start,” Luke admitted. “I’m no healer.”

BD-1 chirped quiet agreement. Distantly, he heard the clanking whine of the engines recede. The lights dimmed as Han or Chewie switched the ship over to auxiliary power, leaving Luke to squint in the semidarkness.

Luke took a few deep breaths. “Okay.” No healers here. Just him. That would have to do. “What first?” he muttered to himself. His only experience with healing had been Uncle Owen’s lesson when Luke was first starting to help him around the moisture farm as a child. He’d explained that it was easy to get hurt—electric shocks from the converters, burns from the steam, falls from the towers—so a bit of first aid was important to know.

He mentally ran through Uncle Owen’s checklist. Cal was breathing; he was out cold and hadn’t reacted to Chewbacca moving him; his neck was clearly injured but didn’t seem broken; and he had apparently been hit by a blaster bolt. There were blaster scars, discolored stripes along his ear and jaw and neck, but they looked old.

He worked his hands gentle beneath Cal’s neck, feeling for bumps, and then ran his fingers lightly through his hair, feeling for any kind of swelling under the scalp that might indicate a head injury. He grimaced as he did so, apologizing in a whisper when his clumsy fingers got caught against the sweaty tangles in Cal’s hair. He pulled his hands away as soon as he was done. Touching someone while they were unconscious, even to help them, felt like a violation.

Having found no apparent head injuries, Luke found himself at the end of Uncle Owen’s frustratingly short list. He deliberated, then decided that even if bacta ointment was usually meant for nothing more than cooking burns and minor cuts, it couldn’t hurt to use it as best as he could.

He worked Cal’s jacket off of him, extricating one arm at a time and then pulling the rest out from under him, thanking BD-1 when he shifted briefly to make space. Beneath the jacket, Cal wore a thin black shirt that looked and smelled like burnt things and blood and stale sweat.

“You think he wants to keep this?” Luke murmured to BD-1, who gave a definitive negative beep. Luke grabbed a pair of cutters from the kit and cut the shirt off, balling both it and the jacket up and tossing them toward the door. He could figure out what to do with them later.

Cal’s torso looked bad, but it wasn’t as gruesome as Luke had feared. Luke had never seen a blaster wound before, but this one was deceptively small, just a round divot in one shoulder, maybe the diameter of two fingertips, the skin around it burnt a deep, blistered red, the flesh in the center charred black. But beyond that, Cal’s skin was intact, none of the splatter or gore that Luke had been imagining, although there was significant bruising along the ribs and sternum.

Luke worked slowly, first using antiseptic wipes to clear away the blood and grime from around the wound, afraid to touch the charred center, doing his best not to press down on the bruises.

After a brief hesitation—and an attempt to read the instructions on the tube, which were in less-than-helpful Shyriiwook—he opened the ointment and squeezed a generous gob directly into the center of the blaster wound. He added a little more to the burns around the edges for good measure. He wasn’t sure if bacta ointment did anything for bruises, but he smeared a little bit on each one anyway.

That done, he dipped his finger in the ointment and began applying a thin layer onto the other marks that he could see, paying special attention to the purple-black bruising at Cal’s throat. He couldn’t imagine what would cause an injury like that. Human hands certainly couldn’t. His own throat burned at the memory of how it had felt through the buffer of the Force.

He reached for Cal’s closest hand, intent on the bruising around the wrist, and started to unfasten the glove. He felt a sudden sharp spike somewhere in the back of his head, as if a nameless fear that he hadn’t even known about had reasserted itself. At that same moment, Cal snapped awake with a strangled gasp and the hand yanked itself out of Luke’s grip. Cal didn’t sit up, didn’t look around, just twisted his hands together and pulled them close to his chest, eyes squeezed tightly shut, breath coming in rapid, trembling gasps.

“Whoa,” Luke said, uncertain whether he should reach out or back away and erring on the side of staying very, very still. “It’s okay. Cal. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Cal didn’t respond, didn’t seem to hear him. He seemed to be struggling to speak, jaw working behind closed lips, eyelids fluttering but never truly opening. Just as Luke was starting to work up to something like panic himself, he was saved by a melodic cascade of binary chirps.

They seemed to cut through Cal’s panic like a siren. Still chattering, BD-1 clambered up onto Cal’s chest and nudged up under Cal’s hands, and while his weight must have been uncomfortable right on the center of Cal’s bruised sternum, Cal’s breathing slowed, his face smoothed, and in the space of just a few more breaths, Cal’s body went limp once more.

After waiting another long minute for any other movement, Luke dropped his face into his hands, ignoring the sticky cling of bacta ointment on his fingertips, willing his heart to slow. When he finally had some semblance of calm, he looked at BD-1, blew out a long breath, and said, “Okay, I think we’re done.”

BD-1 gave a single, solemn chirp of agreement.

“Let me know if he wakes up?” Luke said, and BD-1 chirped again in agreement. Luke stood, only at that moment becoming aware of his own exhaustion. The weight of it almost pulled him back to sitting. He left the room and walked down the hallway in the semidarkness, vaguely wondering if there was another bunk open somewhere on the ship.

He made his way through the echoing walkways. The air was taking on a chill, likely due to the life support systems working at minimal capacity. He could hear the engines thrumming strangely, and somewhere off in the distance the sound of Han and Chewie’s raised voices, their argument punctuated by the pop-pop-pops of an electro-welder.

Luke entered the central room, hoping to scavenge some food from the fresher. He found some sort of salty, instant grits that smelled mildly sulfurous, and once he’d added a bit of water and they began to boil in their bowl, he moved to sit at the table.

He found Obi Wan seated exactly where he’d had left him, eyes closed, a statue in the shadows.

“Ben?” Luke said, voice hushed.

Obi Wan’s eyes opened. They glittered in the dark as he lifted his head and regarded Luke, expression grim. “Luke.”

Luke hesitated. “Are you alright?”

Obi Wan frowned. “Me? Why, yes, of course.” He clasped and unclasped his hands on the table, then said, “Forgive me, Luke. I trust our guest is faring alright?”

“I—think so,” Luke said.

“Good, good.” Obi Wan considered Luke for a long moment, then said, “Come. Sit with me for a minute.”

With rising trepidation, Luke sat on the bench beside him. He set his steaming grits aside. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong. That is to say, what concerns me is a matter that is long past.” Obi Wan looked down again at the tabletop. “And yet the past grows into our present,” he said, almost to himself, then looked up at Luke with fresh resolve and said, “If it hadn’t been for that young Jedi, Darth Vader would have killed me today.”

“You don’t know that,” Luke started to say, but Obi Wan held up a hand to stop him.

“Allow me to finish,” he said. “Had I died today, I would have left you ignorant on a matter of great importance. A matter that I think could cause you grave harm, were you to learn of it in the wrong circumstance, or from the wrong lips.” He hesitated, then pressed on. “A matter thatconcerns you, and Darth Vader.”


	9. Chapter 9

Cal drifted, submerged in a deep, thick darkness. He didn’t know for how long, wasn’t really aware of time passing. Now and then, emotions or sensations emerged that pulled him closer to the surface—a pair of arms lifting him; dented, reassuring metal beneath his fingertips; hands that didn’t hurt running through his hair; sharp, brief moments of suffocating panic, spiking through him but fading just as quickly; unfamiliar voices, speaking to him, around him—but none of these impressions lasted long, and they soon left him in peace again to drift.

But the peace couldn’t last forever. Eventually, something like consciousness found him and dragged him back up to the surface again. He returned to his body, feeling a bit like a rivet with rusted threading, grating and scraping on all sides as he was forced back into place.

As soon as he was awake, he regretted it. His body felt stiff, shapeless, heavy, like all of the blood in his veins had been replaced with viscous tar. Everything hurt.

He could make no sense of the sounds around him. Or rather, the lack of sound. He’d never been in a ship this quiet. He’d never been anywhere this quiet. No footsteps, no voices, not even the distant thrum of engines and life support systems that were always audible in a spacefaring ship. Perhaps he was planetside, somehow, but surely even then he’d hear wind or waves or wildlife.

Uneasy, he waited, eyes closed, listening. It felt like he was in a small room. He was lying down, on a bed or at least something soft. The air was clean, chill, bordering on cold. He smelled something, some spice or perfume. He didn’t seem to be restrained in any way. His chest was bare. There was someone else in the room, shifting and breathing.

Those last two realizations soured his trepidation into dread. He shuffled through his jumbled memories. Assuming the escape attempt had actually happened—not necessarily a safe assumption, considering the Imperials had proven they were both willing and able to drug him into hallucination—the last things he properly remembered were disjointed: the off-white interior of a non-Imperial ship; the old man giving him water that wouldn’t go down; BD-1, pressing up against his chest.

His heart skipped a beat at the thought of the little droid. The droid wasn’t with him. He knew all of the different whirring clicks of BD-1’s components, knew them like his own heartbeat. He couldn’t hear any of that now. Just his own breathing, and the breathing of the other person in the room.

He tried to focus. If it had been a real escape and not a hallucination, he still had no idea if it had been successful. They could have been caught while he was unconscious. Right at that moment, he could be in transit back to Vader.

That thought brought a wave of icy panic. He wrestled with it until he could breathe again, trying to stay still but knowing he’d failed. Cal could feel eyes on him. He gave up pretending, steeled himself, and opened his eyes.

When his eyes adjusted, a dizzying rush of relief swept through him. He recognized the other man in the room as one of his rescuers. No longer in the stormtrooper armor, Skywalker was dressed instead in pale beige robes that looked to have seen their share of time and weather. His hair was wet, his eyes red and puffy as if he’d cried recently or been deprived of sleep, or both. A lightsaber hung at his belt. Cal didn’t dare speculate about that. A lightsaber didn’t necessarily mean a Jedi. In his experience, it more often meant the very opposite.

Skywalker gave him a wan smile. He sat atop a spread of blankets on the floor beside Cal’s bed, a data pad resting in his lap. The room was dark, the only light coming from the data pad and a small blue lantern by Skywalker’s side. “Hi, Cal,” he said, voice careful, almost apprehensive. He ducked his head, as if trying to better see Cal’s eyes. “Are you—awake?”

There was an unspoken _actually_ living in the middle of that question. Had there been other wakings? Cal thought of his faint impressions of motion, of panic, and wondered how many false starts there had been.

When Cal managed a nod, Skywalker visibly relaxed. “That’s good,” he said.

Cal drew in a breath to speak, but his words lodging like physical objects in his throat. He gagged and coughed.

“Oh,” Skywalker said. “Hold on. Here.” He picked up a small earthenware cup beside the lantern and shifted closer to Cal’s side. He didn’t notice Cal tense up, and Cal didn’t want him to, but it was taking every ounce of Cal’s self control in that moment not to flinch away from Skywalker’s hand on his arm. Feeling inexpressibly weak, heat gathering behind his eyes, he blinked up at the ceiling and tried to remind himself that this man was probably as close to safety as Cal had been in quite some time.

“Ben said this might help,” Skywalker was saying, frowning at the cup. He looked up, then paused at whatever he saw on Cal’s face. “Oh.“ He pulled his hand back as if he’d been burned. “I’m sorry, I’m not going to hurt you, I swear.” As he spoke, he sounded a little choked up himself, and he took a moment to look up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. When he looked down again, his eyes were bright but steady. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m not a medic. I’m probably the last person on this ship that you want looking after you. So—that’s some bad luck on your part, I guess.”

Strangely that admission, more than anything else, helped soothe Cal’s nerves. He almost wanted to laugh. He must be a hell of a patient if he was already driving his caretaker to tears. Instead, he forced a tight smile and managed to move his hand just enough to pat Skywalker’s hand where it rested on the bedspread.

At that touch, Skywalker sagged, clearly relieved. “See? That’s supposed to be my line,” he said and chuckled, scrubbing his hands down his face. He reemerged after a moment with a sigh and then, more steadily, picked up the cup again and said, “You just—tap me or something if you need me to stop what I’m doing.”

Cal nodded. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had something to drink.

Skywalker was about as awkward a caretaker as Cal was a patient, and that, again, put Cal at ease. Skywalker apologized as he slipped an arm under Cal’s back and neck, apologized again as he shifted to prop him up. Cal tried to shift himself up to help, but gave up when seemingly every muscle in his body shrieked in protest. The thick, gauzy material of Skywalker’s sleeve was surprisingly comforting, woven through with faint, passive echoes that felt like laughter and dry wind and sunlight. They drove away some of the chill in his bones.

The drink in the cup was some kind of tea that Cal didn’t recognize. It was warm, smelled like flowers, tasted mildly sweet, and while it hurt to swallow, he didn’t cough it back up, which felt like a good sign.

After he managed to swallow a couple of mouthfuls, he finally found the space in his throat to voice to his primary concern. “BD?”

“He’s fine,” Skywalker said. He helped Cal drink the rest of the small cup and said, “He’s been with you mostly. But our captain needed help with some repairs to our engines.”

Cal digested that. “Did—?” He wasn’t sure what question to ask first. A headache made itself known in the space between his eyes. “Where—?”

“We’re safe for now,” Skywalker said, guessing the direction of Cal’s thoughts. He helped settle Cal back down against the mattress.

Cal squinted at him. It sounded like there was a “but” at the end of that statement.

Skywalker sighed. “But Imperial ships have been tracking us since we escaped, and our engines got damaged when a couple of them caught up to us. They’re powered down for now so that we can try and patch them. We’re hoping that having our systems off will hide our signature a bit. Which is why—” he gestured vaguely at the ceiling, clearly meaning the darkness and the distinct lack of air rushing through the vents.

“Han says we have a couple of days of air before we need to worry,” Skywalker continued. “So I’m trying not to.” He ran a nervous hand through his hair. It was a familiar motion, just like when he’d first taken his helmet off back in the interrogation room. Cal didn’t think anyone had ever been as beautiful to him as that man had been in that moment.

“It’s already gotten pretty cold, though,” Skywalker added, clearly uncomfortable with Cal’s silence.

Cal glanced down at his own chest, noting the shine of some kind of ointment on his skin, along with a clean square of bandaging covering the blaster wound in his shoulder. He hadn’t yet seen the injury himself, beyond the burns on his jacket. Back on the destroyer, before they put him in a cell, a medical officer had briefly checked him over. She’d probed a finger into the fresh blaster wound and hummed disinterestedly while Cal twisted weakly in the stormtroopers’ grips. She’d finally removed her hand and wiped the bloodied, soot-stained fingers of her glove on Cal’s sleeve and left without a word. After that, he hadn’t felt much motivation to check himself over. It wasn’t as if he’d expected to live long enough to die of infection. The imperials must have agreed; that was the only time he’d gotten anything resembling medical attention.

Cal blinked rapidly. Skywalker had said something, but Cal had missed it.

Skywalker looked concerned. “I patched your shoulder as best as I could. Do you think you might be hurt badly anywhere else?”

Cal shook his head minutely, wincing at the pain that movement sent through his neck. Every single muscle in his body felt strained past exhaustion, but he doubted anything but time could treat that.

“Okay,” Skywalker said. “Good.”

Beyond the room, there were clanking sounds and raised voices—one human, one Wookiee. It was the Wookiee who was speaking mostly while the human protested. Cal’s Shyriiwook was a little rusty, but he gathered that the the engines were beyond repair. They could limp to a planet nearby, but even then he doubted that they had the credits to fix the ship up properly. While the Wookiee made what seemed to be a fairly rational assessment of the situation, the human mostly punctuated the Wookiee’s thoughts with things like, “We’re not getting paid enough for this,” and “Never would have taken this job if I knew we’d end up on the skewered end of a goddamn destroyer’s fleet,” and “I’m dropping all of them off on the nearest asteroid.”

Based on Skywalker’s eyeroll, this kind of speech wasn’t new or unexpected.

“Don’t worry about Han,” Skywalker said, giving Cal another dim smile. “He keeps saying he’s just here for the credits, but he hasn’t let us down yet.” He said nothing about the engines. Perhaps he didn’t understand Shyriiwook.

Cal managed to hum his understanding. He wanted to know about the plans, but wasn’t sure how to do so without asking openly. Just because the man had saved him while escaping the Empire didn’t automatically mean he was with the Rebellion.

Finally, Cal landed on, “Obi Wan?”

For a split second, Skywalker frowned, and Cal’s heart sank, but then Skywalker was shaking his head and saying, “Oh, yeah. I’m still getting used to that name. He’s alright.” Skywalker thought a little, then tilted his head and admitted, “At least I think he is. I think fighting Va—” he cut himself off, looking almost sick, then continued after a beat, “I think the fight took a lot out of him.”

The old man, then. The one who had fought Vader. The one who offered Cal water and had called BD-1 little one. Had they gotten the plans to the Rebellion already? Why, then, had the Rebellion sent the old Jedi to sabotage that particular Imperial ship? Surely it hadn’t been to rescue Cal, or the rest of the crew. Surely they wouldn’t waste their resources that way.

“That was incredible, by the way,” Skywalker was saying, drawing Cal back out of his thoughts. Skywalker smiled at Cal again. “That was you, right? The lightsaber?” He slightly pantomimed a twisting motion with both hands.

Cal nodded. He was pretty sure it had nearly killed him, wrung out the last bit of strength left in his body. Master Tapal had more than once told Cal that he had to be careful because of his strong empathetic skill in the Force. He could take in more of the Force than most people, but he could lose more of himself as well. Cere had once talked about a Jedi in the flow of the Force like a boat in an ocean, simultaneously buoyed and driven by the Force’s currents, but still their own individual self, careful not to draw to much water into their vessel. Careful to avoid sinking. She’d then laughed and called Cal a leaky rowboat.

At the thought of Cere, he felt a complicated mix of tension and longing. He wanted to see her so badly, to see her face and replace the cruel hallucination that had taunted him back in the interrogation room. He wanted her to hug him and tell him that everything was okay. That he was alive, that he was more or less whole. That he was still his own self, not twisted and broken by Vader into a tool of the Empire, into nothing but a warped shadow.

Abruptly, there were tears in his eyes. He blinked and they flowed down past his temples and into his hair. His next breath was a sob.

“What’s wrong?” Skywalker’s voice was gentle, calm, but Cal could see him scanning Cal’s body with sharp eyes, clearly looking for some physical hurt that he’d missed.

Cal shook his head, choked on a laugh. He grabbed Skywalker’s hand, relieved when Skywalker returned the pressure. He worked his mouth but couldn’t get any proper words out. He couldn’t begin to articulate the yawning abyss of anger and gratitude and hope and fear that uncurled in the center of him like a living thing.

“Thank you,” he finally managed to get out. “I thought I was lost.” Skywalker’s hand tightened on his own, a lifeline as his exhaustion rose back up and threatened to claim him. Just as he let his eyes fall shut, he felt calloused fingers on his face, wiping away the dampness that clung to his cheeks.

#

Luke sat with Cal until he slipped into a restless sleep, and then for a long time after that.

Luke looked at his hand, still loosely twined with Cal’s. While Cal had cried, Luke had wanted to say something, anything, but he couldn’t seem to get his mouth to work and nothing came out. No reassurances, no soothing words, just squeezing Cal’s hand tightly and hoping he wasn’t hurting him and feeling completely useless. He could still feel the ghost of Cal’s tears on his fingertips.

His father had done this. His father had tortured this man.

Luke let go of Cal’s hand and pressed the heels of his palms to his own face, pushing down hard enough to see stars. He hadn’t wanted to believe Ben when he first told him. Surely there was a mistake. Ben was confused. Luke’s parents had died, just like Ben had initially said, just like Uncle Owen had always told him.

He’d always had some image of his parents in his head, ever since he was young. As a child, he’d pretended that they were a king and queen in some distant system, forced by powerful enemies to hide him in secret so that he could one day take up the throne. As he’d grown older, he’d accepted that they had far more likely been simple people living quiet lives and who’d been taken too early by sickness or accident. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d always hoped that he was making them proud.

But no. His mother was dead—and royalty! How his child self would have triumphed to know it.

And his father was alive. But that was worse than dead. In that life, Vader had done more damage in the name of the Empire than anyone. How many people had his father killed? How many lives, ruined?

He shook his head and scrubbed his hands over his face again. He needed to sleep. He’d tried, but his mind raced with too many questions, too much conflict in his anger and his grief.

Rather than sleep, he’d thrown himself into trying to care for Cal. The man, weak and exhausted as he was, slept poorly. He had seemingly woken a half-dozen times, only to be insensible, trapped in nightmare, crying out and twisting away from invisible enemies, and Luke had been helpless to ease his pain and fear. And in between those fits, Cal had lain very still, apparently dead but for the slow rise and fall of his chest. Even when the ship had twisted and turned to avoid Imperial ships and asteroids, he hadn’t moved.

At least, aided by BD-1’s encouraging beeps, he’d convinced a stubborn, less-than-conscious Cal to open his mouth and managed to get some broth and tea into him. And now, at least, Cal had managed to drink a cup of it on his own. Luke hoped the droid would be back soon. Cal was so much easier to calm when BD-1 was nearby.

Even now, Cal’s jaw tightened in his sleep and he whimpered, eyes screwed tightly shut. Luke made hushing noises, careful not to touch him, and his chest ached and his resolve hardened.

His father had done this. His father had done this to so many people.

Luke couldn’t let that continue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for all of the lovely comments, everyone!


	10. Chapter 10

Luke must have fallen asleep at some point.

He woke, disoriented, squinting in the sudden glare of the ceiling lights. The power was back on—he could hear the engines distantly and feel the air rushing in from the life support system vents, cold stale atmosphere being heated and scrubbed of carbon and impurities. It didn’t smell much less stale, though the heat was an improvement at least. Nobody had ever told him that life on a ship would consist of so many different shades of the same metallic smell and taste.

He unstuck his face from the pad screen that had somehow become his pillow, and stretched, spine and hips popping. There was very little floor space in the room, and he’d ended up leaning against the side of the bed, one arm on the mattress, slumped sideways. He was sure he’d slept in less comfortable positions before, but at the moment he couldn’t recall any of them.

He looked at Cal. The man was in the exact same position that he’d been before Luke had fallen asleep, flat on his back, hands loose atop the bedspread. Not even the sudden bright light roused him. Their hands were beside each other, fingertips just touching.

Luke lifted his hand gently away and took advantage of the better light to check on Cal’s wounds. He thought they looked better, though it was difficult to really tell, considering he’d first tended to them in near darkness. The blaster wound might be better, maybe. The skin around it less blistered at least. And the dark purple and blue bruising of his neck was fading in places to greens and yellows.

Something caught his eye, a clean, oval of shiny white scar tissue in the freckled skin above Cal’s hip. It looked strange, somehow, nothing like any kind of scarring that Luke had seen before. It was pale and flat enough that he hadn’t noticed it at all when the lights had been dim.

Someone cleared their throat, and Luke turned to see Ben in the doorway. Ben had lost the hunted slant to his shoulders, and the ashy gray pallor was gone from his face. “How is our new friend?” Ben asked.

BD-1 appeared behind him, then pattered into the room, still covered in engine oil. Luke caught him before he could jump onto Cal’s chest.

“He woke up for a bit,” Luke said, grabbing a stray rag and wiping the wriggling droid down. “Properly awake. He seemed to understand where he was. He even had some of your tea, Ben.” He didn’t mention the nightmares. BD-1 and Ben had both witnessed them earlier, and BD-1 had been so reluctant to leave Cal’s side because of them. When the engines had initially failed to recover, Luke had resorted to pleading with the little droid to get him to go help Han and Chewie.

Ben hummed. “Good. He’ll likely need a great deal of sleep. That trick with the lightsaber overstretched him, mind and body. And he clearly had already been near his limit on both of those fronts.”

BD-1 warbled questioningly, finally holding still long enough for Luke to get at the oil that clung to his leg joints.

“He did ask about you,” Luke said. He gave the now mostly-oil-free droid a last once over, then set him down on the bed at Cal’s side. “I told him you were helping with the engines.”

BD-1 perched at the head of the bed critically, projecting a bright blue scan up and down Cal’s body.

Luke glanced up at Obi wan. “Are they fixed, by the way?”

BD-1 gave a negative beep, and Ben shook his head at the same time.

“No, the engines aren’t reparable without landing,” Ben said, and sighed. “And it would seem our options are limited.” He reached across Luke to grab the data pad, typing in a few coordinates and pulling up the projection of a small-ish, desert planet. “We can hopefully make it to a planet that’s near here. It’s designated with just a number, but apparently the locals sometimes call it Pile. It’s not big, but our systems do indicate that they have some shipyards and junk sellers.” He scratched at his beard, looking displeased. “We’re low on credits, and our pilot has insinuated that he may have some unfortunate history with some unsavory folk in the local smuggling business.”

Luke almost laughed. “Of course he does.” He shook his head. “So I guess we’ll need to be ready for trouble.” Just the thought of having to pick up a blaster and fight again had Luke feeling every second that had gone by since his bed at home, days ago.

“Indeed.” Ben eyed Luke, then stepped further into the room and put a hand on Luke’s shoulder. “You should rest.”

“My bed’s a little full,” Luke said, indicating BD-1 and Cal stretched out on the mattress—a mattress that Luke had never a chance to sleep in anyway. Besides, he didn’t like the idea of leaving Cal’s side.

“Take my bunk,” Ben said. “I can keep an eye on him.”

Luke bit his lip, torn, then nodded and clambered to his feet. He felt a little woozy as he did so, and decided that he’d visit the food storage before sleeping. “Let me know if you need help with anything,” he said.

“Of course,” Ben said and lowered himself to sit on the floor, settling atop the messy pile of blankets as if they were a plush cushion. Up on the bed, BD-1 chirped and folded himself down at Cal’s side.

#

There was a bright light above him. Cal squinted against it, blinded, pinned. He braced himself, waiting for something to happen, for pain to take over or Vader’s voice to cut through the quiet. But after a long, relatively painless breath, and then another, and then another, he shifted and realized that he wasn’t pinned at all. He was lying somewhere soft. The high, roaring static in his ears had been replaced by a familiar, whistling chatter.

He looked away from the light and found himself eye to scanner with BD-1, who was perched in the center of his chest. He blinked, and the droid chirped, his display flipping from an anxious red to a cheerful green.

Cal smiled back at him. He opened his mouth, but closed it again, afraid to test his abused vocal chords just yet. Instead, he lifted a hand to touch BD-1’s casing, the complaints in his muscles quickly washed out by the echoes of warmth and affection that radiated from the cool metal. There were several new scratches that Cal knew hadn’t been there when he saw him last. He smelled like engine oil and bulkhead sealant—not usually Cal’s favorite smells, but a welcome change from the electrical smell and taste that seemed to live in his nose and mouth now.

“I missed you, buddy.” He mouthed the words, giving hardly any breath to them. He knew that BD-1 would understand him just fine.

BD-1 whistled his agreement, then sobered, green display flipping through blue and then settling on yellow as he gave a concerned series of chirps about Cal’s health—Cal was hurt, but the mission wasn’t yet over. The other organics were nice enough, but BD-1 wasn’t convinced that they really had a good handle on the situation.

Cal glanced to the side, expecting Skywalker, but instead found a stranger sitting on the floor beside him. The smile slipped from his face. His pulse ticked up nervously and refused to calm even after he recognized the man.

“Good afternoon,” the old Jedi said. He smiled at Cal pleasantly. “You’ve nothing to fear here. Certainly not from me.”

Cal blinked at him, not yet trusting himself to respond past his galloping heartbeat. He swallowed, noting that his throat felt more like sandpaper now, rather than broken glass. A welcome improvement. He lifted a hand, gratified when the action brought only brought mild pain to his muscles and joints, and touched his bruised neck lightly. The skin was swollen and hot to the touch, but didn’t hurt too badly when he pressed his palm against it. Back on the Imperial ship he’d wondered, in a nebulous sort of way, whether the damage from all of the screaming and Vader’s Force grip would prove permanent.

He swallowed again, and for a split-second there was a strange sort of double-sensation—his bruised throat as it was now, but at the same time the deafening, lightning-strike crack of a dying man’s spine as it broke beneath Vader’s grip, the sound and sensation so encompassing and incomprehensible that his mind didn’t even really register it as pain.

He flinched; maybe he made a sound. The sensation faded. He forced his eyes open, not sure when he’d let them close.

The old man studied him, the pleasant expression replaced with frank concern. “Are you in significant pain?”

Cal shook his head. He didn’t want to explain that he was being haunted by memories that weren’t even his. There was no reason to tell this man about his psychometry, and he hardly had the voice for that explanation anyway.

As Cal had hoped, Kenobi nodded a little bit, though the concerned look only faded somewhat. “I understand your name is Cal Kestis,” he said, and Cal nodded slightly. “May I thank you, personally? I believe I would be dead, had you not taken the actions that you did.”

Cal tried a smile. It felt more like a grimace on his lips.

“I admit,” Obi Wan continued, “that I was surprised to see it. I’ve only seen one person control a light saber from a distance like that before.”

Cal huffed. “Vader?” he guessed in a whisper, pleased that whispering seemed to only caused him minor pain. He lowered his hand to the bare skin on his side, just off-center, below his ribs. The old light saber scar was smooth beneath his fingertips, and he lifted his fingers so that Kenobi could see it. When he’d recovered from Vader’s attack, all those years ago, he’d spent weeks working to perfect his control, hours upon hours twisting his saber through the air with the Force. On the off chance that he ever ran into Vader again. Cere was going to be so pleased, if he ever got a chance to tell her.

“Indeed,” Kenobi said, his tone grave, but his eyes sparked with a wry humor. Perhaps Cal’s satisfaction showed on his face. “I take it you were simply returning a favor, then?”

Cal inclined his head. He let his hand fall back to the bed.

“I’m Obi Wan Kenobi,” the man said. “Though I suppose you may have already known. It was your little droid, after all, who brought us together.” He paused, then said, “I hate to ask you to speak, but I must know—how is it that you knew to contact me?”

The old man had worked so hard to stay in seclusion. Cal had to wonder what he had been trying to hide. “My master,” Cal said finally. “Cere. Spoke of you.”

“Cere,” Kenobi said, and squinted off to the side as if holding the name up against some very old memories for comparison. “Yes. I remember her. She’s your master? I thought her Padawan...” he trailed off.

Cal shook his head. “My master was lost when the clones turned.” He took a few long breaths, feeling suddenly dizzy and sick from the effort of speaking. After a moment the feeling passed, and he continued, “I was a child. Cere found me, years later.”

Kenobi digested that for a moment, then asked, “Were you alone all that time?”

Cal twitched his shoulder in a shrug.

“I’m sorry.” Kenobi passed a hand over his face, and Cal remembered that the old man had been a Jedi council member. He must have lost a great deal in the great betrayal. Perhaps he’d even lost a Padawan of his own. “Does Cere still live?”

“Yes,” Cal said, and for a moment he tasted blood in his mouth once more and felt the phantom sensation of the hallucination cupping his face in her hands, petting his cheek while he screamed. He set his jaw against it and blinked rapidly to set himself back in the present.

Again, Kenobi studied him, his expression inscrutable. It felt as if he could see right through him, and Cal cast around uncomfortably for a different direction to their conversation. “The plans?” he tried.

Kenobi sighed. “Still with us, I’m afraid.” When Cal glanced to BD-1, the little droid beeped in confirmation.

Cal had guessed as much. Still, he had to close his eyes against the wave of exhaustion and despair that dragged at him. All of that pain, so many lives lost, and the mission still wasn’t finished.

“I’m sorry, Cal,” Kenobi said, and he did sound truly regretful. “Tell me, does the Empire know what are in these plans?”

Cal shook his head minutely. He’d heard an incredible tale of a small group of Rebellion forces infiltrating an Imperial data storage facility. And that the Empire had destroyed the entire planet to try and stop them. The only copy of the plans were sitting in little BD-1’s data drive.

“That’s good at least,” Kenobi said. Perhaps he was trying to sound encouraging, but Cal just felt very, very tired. “The Empire won’t know how to defend against the sabotage, when it comes. Our taking a little more time to deliver the plans won’t jeopardize their effectiveness.”

Cal hadn’t thought of that. It did actually make him feel a little better.

Kenobi shifted audibly, his robes rustling. “Also,” hesaid, “I believe I have something of yours. It didn’t seem likely to belong to Lord Vader, at least.”

Something in Kenobi’s tone made Cal open his eyes again. He drew in a sharp breath at the sight of his light saber, resting lightly on Kenobi’s flat palms.

“I thought—” Cal said, his voice catching. He’d thought it had been left behind, likely tangled in the wreckage of Vader’s body. “Thank you.”

Kenobi smiled. “Certainly less work than crafting a new one.” He offered it to Cal, holding it within easy reach of the bed.

Cal reached up to take it, and he didn’t register the echoes until his fingers had almost made contact. There was a flash of white light. For an eternity of a moment, all he knew was Vader’s fingers resting casually on the hilt while the echoes of Cal’s screams faded from the room, of Vader’s helmet looming close while Cal twisted and choked, of Vader’s other hand gripping Cal’s wrist, of Vader’s voice filling his head, echoing with false gentleness, that cruel, dark amusement burning like a poison as he said, _Psychometry. That’s a rare gift._

Cal snatched his hand away, and then twisted to the side and retched, watery bile and little else coming up as he vomited onto the metal floor.

“Oh,” he heard Kenobi say, and then the echoes quieted as Kenobi set the saber aside. He placed a gentle hand in the center of Cal’s back.

Cal’s throat burned, and he could feel reflexive tears streaming down his cheeks, sweat pricking on his forehead and upper lip. He’d unseated BD-1 from his perch on Cal’s chest, and the droid was chirping his concern, butting his little body against Cal’s side. Cal dropped a hand to touch BD-1, giving his casing a reassuring pat.

“Sorry,” Cal managed after a long moment, feeling wrung out. The blaster wound on his shoulder began to throb in time with his heartbeat.

“It’s quite alright,” Kenobi said. He produced a couple of rags from the supply bag beside him—one he dropped unceremoniously atop the mess on the floor, and the other he used to wipe Cal’s mouth before helping him to lie back down. “I’m sorry, Cal,” he said, his thick white brows knitting together as he stood. “I’ve asked a lot of you. Allow me to get you something to drink, and then you can rest.”

Cal watched Kenobi go. After the old man had left the room, Cal’s eyes dropped to his lightsaber. It lay innocuously on the floor beside the medical kit, where Kenobi had left it. Cal’s vision blurred. He’d already known he was never getting his saber back. He’d known that the moment he saw it hanging from Vader’s belt. To have it returned to him, returned tainted—it shouldn’t be worse. It was no more lost to him now than it had been before.

He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and tried not to sob. His chest and throat already hurt enough.

BD-1 clambered back onto Cal’s chest, careful to avoid the bandaging. His cool metal casing was soothing against the ache in Cal’s chest. After a moment, BD-1 warbled a tentative question.

“No,” Cal said, and scrubbed at his eyes impatiently. “I’m not going to tell him.” He wasn’t going to tell anybody on this ship about his psychometry. Allies or not, that was just one more thing that could be used against him.

Clearly confused, BD-1 nonetheless whistled in agreement. If that’s what Cal wanted, he wouldn’t tell either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and for your patience! Life’s been hectic, but I promise I’m still (slowly) chugging along on this fic.  
> As always, thank you for everybody who’s commented - every comment makes my day!


	11. Chapter 11

The planet where they landed was almost entirely sand and rocky deserts. One sun, three moons. Very little local wildlife, and sparsely settled with humanoid races. It was outside the jurisdiction of the Empire, and very much within Hutt territory. Luke felt almost at home as the Falcon settled in the space between two dunes and he watched the red sand billow up around the view screen.

When the ship had stopped moving, Han emerged from the cockpit and announced that he and Chewie would make the journey into town as soon as the engines had cooled.

Ben stood, a little creakily, and said, “I’ll come along.”

Luke expected Han to brush Ben off, but to his surprise Han latched onto the offer. According to him, it was going to take a miracle for them to buy the parts they needed. They had nowhere near enough credits between the four of them.

“So if your—” Han made a vague hand-waving motion “—can help with that, that’d be great.”

Ben looked amused. “It may.”

“Then it’s settled,” Han said. “We’ll head into town. Luke, you’ll stay behind to keep an eye on BD-1 and our rebel.”

Luke felt a flare of annoyance at the dismissive way that Han said ‘rebel’—and maybe also some fondness for Han’s use of the possessive—and said, “I can come if you need me to. You said there were some people on this planet you’re trying to avoid, right? Maybe you should stay on the ship.”

Han rolled his eyes, but was matter-of-fact as he said, “Listen, kid. You haven’t exactly been great at avoiding attention so far. You know what I mean?”

Luke did. With some embarrassment, he thought of the angry drunks back in the cantina on Tattooine, or his meltdown in the hangar. He opened his mouth to argue, but shut it again a moment later as he realized that he didn’t really want to leave Cal alone anyway. And certainly not alone with Han, who might be a good guy but who clearly had very little in the way of empathy or tact.

“Fine,” Luke said. “I’ll stay.”

“Don’t let anybody on my ship,” Han said, pointing an accusing finger at Luke before stepping down the ramp.

Luke scoffed. “Okay, but only because you said so.” He then withstood a fond pat on the shoulder from Chewie that was heavy enough to nearly knock him to his knees. “Yeah, see you soon, Chewie.”

Ben chuckled and grabbed Luke’s arm to steady him. “Farewell Luke,” he said solemnly, and Luke had to wonder if Ben was going to be like this every time they went anywhere separately. “Don’t forget you have this.” He tapped the saber on Luke’s belt. “And this.” He tapped Luke’s forehead.

“Ben, I’m not even gonna leave the ship,” Luke said.

“We might not be in Imperial territory,” Ben said. “But that doesn’t mean this planet is without its perils.

“Okay, okay,” Luke said, ceding the point. “You guys stay out of trouble too.”

Once Ben, Han, and Chewie were nothing more than specks in the distant dunes, Luke hit a switch on the wall and watched the ramp seal back up into the wall. Almost immediately, the baking heat that had been rolling up off of the sands dissipated. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead, grimacing at the sweat. He’d always thought that one of the upsides to leaving Tatooine would be leaving this kind of heat behind. Just his luck that the second planet he visited in his life was just more desert.

It was still early morning. Luke considered how to keep himself busy for the day. He’d already eaten, but decided to have a second breakfast just for the hell of it. He’d checked the inventory, and Han and Chewie weren’t running out of their vaguely sulfurous grits any time soon. He sure hoped they liked the stuff better than he did.

He slept a while in Ben’s bunk, and woke with a feeling that his dreams had been dark and frightening, but unable to remember them at all.

Out in the common area, Luke tried practicing with his lightsaber—if slashing it awkwardly through the air could really be called practice—but gave up when he nearly dropped it and imagined having to explain to Han how he’d accidentally put a hole through the hull. Luke didn’t actually know if the lightsaber could cut through metal that easily, but it seemed best not to risk it.

That done, he had officially run out of things to do. Usually, he was more than capable of finding ways to keep himself occupied, but now he found his thoughts turning to Vader again, a dark turmoil roiling in his chest. He sank onto the bench and set his face in his hands.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it. The brutal, mechanical way that Vader had moved as he fought Ben. As if he weren’t even human. Maybe he wasn’t anymore. His consciousness certainly hadn’t felt human when he’d caught hold of Luke through the Force. He’d felt like a monster, like something he might have had nightmares about as a child.

Ben had told Luke that Anakin Skywalker had been his closest friend, like brothers. Luke couldn’t imagine it. And he couldn’t imagine such a person loving someone, as Ben said Anakin had loved Luke’s mother.

That direction of thought made him feel very heavy, and he sighed and decided that he would go try and scrounge up some holos. Han seemed like the kind of guy who could have either a library of holos, or just a couple of pornos, and he couldn’t honestly decide which seemed more likely. Chewie, on the other hand, struck him as a serial drama kind of guy. Ben and everyone probably wouldn’t be back for hours still at the earliest, so he’d have plenty of time to look around.

He hooked his lightsaber back onto his belt, quickly pushing away the unsettling thought that this weapon, too, connected him to Vader. Even if he didn’t think about it, the history was still there, part of the very tool that he was supposed to use to protect himself.

He made his way through the ship, stopping briefly in the food storage to find something that wasn’t grits. At the back of a shelf, he found an unlabeled silver-foil packet that revealed itself to be filled with some sort of dried yellow fruit. He took a tentative bite, chewed for a moment to try and discern the flavor, then gave up and took another bite. A little sweet, a little sour. It was actually pretty good. Definitely better than grits.

He passed through the hallway, steps echoing around him. Then, a strange sensation prickled sharply at the back of his head. For a moment, he felt almost woozy. He slowed, still chewing, then frowned and sniffed the fruit packet suspiciously. Ben was not going to be impressed if he poisoned himself with random unmarked foodstuff.

The sensation grew stronger, until it no longer felt physical, but like some sound that was maybe just on the edge of his hearing. He tilted his head, listening, eyes on the floor. And then, he abruptly recognized the sensation and started walking again, taking a quick turn down the hall, back toward Cal’s room.

He paused right before he reached the open door. At first, all he could hear was BD-1’s soft whistling. But then, softer, he recognized Cal’s voice, distressed, gritting out something that was too quiet or too jumbled for Luke to understand. BD-1 trilled, a long, soothing tone that wasn’t so much him saying anything as it was the droid equivalent of humming. Cal’s voice hesitated, then fell quiet, and with it, the prickling sensation in Luke’s head lost its urgency and then, finally, disappeared entirely.

Luke waited another minute, debating whether he should just leave, then screwed his face up and knocked lightly. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Is it alright if I come in?”

It was BD-1’s tones that invited him in, not Cal’s.

Luke stepped inside tentatively, strangely relieved when nothing looked out of place. Cal looked peaceful enough, face turned away from the door, apparently dead asleep again—although there was a blanket on his chest that had clearly been disrupted by restless sleep, and it was still gripped loosely in his gloved hand. His other hand was limp at his side, where BD-1 was perched now, watching Luke solemnly.

The blanket must have been Ben’s doing. Luke didn’t even know where he would find spare blankets on this ship. He’d already had a hell of a time trying to find other basic amenities like cutlery and soap. He wasn’t sure if Han and Chewie were too strapped for credits to buy the basics, or if it just hadn’t occurred to them that they could live better than this.

“Is he alright?” Luke whispered, and after some hesitation BD-1 replied that Cal’s poor sleep continued, but it was nothing the droid couldn’t handle. Luke nodded—he was curious to know what Cal had been saying, but knew it would be an overstep to ask. He wasn’t Cal’s friend. It wasn’t his place to pry.

He took a closer look at Cal. The bruising was fading quickly from around Cal’s throat, as well as what he could see of his chest and ribs, much faster than Luke would have expected. Luke made a mental note to check the blaster wound the next time Cal was awake. He wondered if the cheap bacta ointment and Ben’s tea had actually done their job, or if perhaps fast healing was a Jedi thing.

BD-1 hadn’t left Cal’s side since the previous evening, when Ben had watched over him. Luke had never met such a loyal droid. The again, he also hadn’t known anyone who clearly had such a deep emotional bond with their droid. Back in the moisture farm, the droids had been helpful tools, pleasant to chat with and worth being kind to, but hardly complex enough to form a true friendship with. Or—he considered for the first time, with some discomfort—perhaps he’d just assumed they were incapable of real relationships, and so hadn’t tried to get to know them. After all, Uncle Own had treated them well, but they weren’t family members, and he’d never minded buying or selling them as needed.

BD-1 certainly seemed to have much more personality, but that might just be the type of droid that he was. An exploration droid was probably programmed with a lot of imagination and adaptability. It would make sense that he’d be more of an individual.

“How long have you known each other?” Luke whispered, and BD-1 warbled a quiet response. “Wow, you don’t look that old. He’s been taking good care of you.” BD-1 trilled, and Luke laughed softly. “Yeah, I’m sure you take good care of him, too. We wouldn’t have found him without you, after all.”

At that, BD-1’s display darkened from placid blue and into an anxious orange. He gave a low, guilty string of whistles.

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up,” Luke said. He gave BD-1’s casing a tentative pat. “You didn’t leave him behind. He told you to go. If you’d stayed, you both would have been captured, and then who would have known to come for you?”

BD-1 considered that. After a long moment, he let out a soft, trilling admission: If BD-1 hadn’t escaped with the plans, they wouldn’t have hurt Cal like this.

“Oh,” Luke said. He thought about that, comparing it to what he knew of the Empire and what little information he’d gathered about Vader. He debated whether he should answer at all for a moment, then sighed and said, “You know, I’m not sure that’s true. Even if they’d gotten the plans—I don’t think that would have kept him from being hurt. I think for Vader, it might have been about more than just the plans.” Although what that might be, specifically, he couldn’t really say. The locations of the Rebel bases? The names of the Rebel leaders? Or had it really been about the Rebellion at all?

BD-1 looked down and was silent for a while, perhaps thinking on Luke’s words.

“I don’t think there’s anything you could have done differently,” Luke added, hoping that was the right thing to say. “I’m sure Cal thinks the same thing.”

At that, BD-1 gave a thoughtful chirp. He twitched his antennae at Luke gratefully, the orange fading back to a neutral blue. Luke smiled at him, then turned to look around the room. There were a couple of empty cups beside the bed. He gathered those onto a nearby tray, then paused as he noticed a lightsaber that he didn’t recognize lying on the floor beside the health kit.

He picked it up gingerly, careful not to activate it. He saw that it had two emitters and guessed that this must be the double-sided saber that had taken Vader down. It probably belonged to Cal, he realized, feeling a little stupid. Unless Vader had stolen some other Jedi’s lightsaber, which—could be possible, he supposed. Perhaps stealing others’ lightsabers was common among Force sensitive people, like keeping a trophy.

He turned the lightsaber over in his hands, and saw that there were several more buttons that didn’t exist on own lightsaber. He wondered what those did. He wondered what determined the color, and why Cal’s had two blades when every other saber seemed to have just one.

He still had so much to learn. It was more than a little overwhelming.

He examined the saber for another moment, then leaned it up against the wall by the door. He turned around to pick up the tray, and then nearly dropped it again when he realized that Cal’s eyes were open, watching him.

“Sorry,” Luke said quickly, just managing to save the cups from crashing to the floor.

“For what?” Cal said, sounding honestly curious.

Luke hesitated, then laughed a little and said, “I don’t know.”

“Oh,” Cal said. He smiled crookedly. “I forgive you, then.”

For a moment, Luke felt like he might have forgotten how to talk. He latched onto the first thing that came to mind and said, “Are you feeling alright?”

As soon as he said it, he felt like an idiot, but Cal didn’t seem to think it was a stupid question. He actually seemed to consider it for a moment, as if he’d forgotten that he had a body that he could take stock of. “Yes,” he said finally. “I’m actually not too bad.”

It was incredible, Luke thought, what a couple of days of rest and healing had done for his voice. The last time Luke had seen him awake, each word had sounded like broken glass and looked about as painful. Cal was definitely still hoarse, but speech no longer seemed to be a struggle.

“It’s good to see you awake,” Luke said, lingering, still holding the tray. He wasn’t sure if Cal wanted him to stick around. Maybe he just wanted to rest alone for a while.

“It’s good to be awake,” Cal said, though Luke wondered if that was actually true. Cal looked exhausted already. He shifted without lifting his head from the pillow, glancing around the room, catching and then lingering on the lightsaber by the door.

BD-1 chirped an echo to Luke’s sentiment, and Cal seemed to snap out of some heavy thought. He grinned and tapped one of BD-1’s antennae fondly.

“I’m gonna—” Luke said, and tilted his head at the tray in his hands before turning to leave. Behind him, he heard Cal take a breath, as if to say something, and he paused and turned back.

Cal looked like he was about to ask something, eyes intent on Luke’s face, but then he closed his mouth and seemed to think better of it. Instead, he dropped his gaze to the floor, and said, “Could I ask you to get me some water?”

Luke straightened. “Of course.”

He stepped out of the room, and as he made his way back down the hall, he could hear Cal murmur something to BD-1, who responded in bright, cheerful tones.

In the food storage, he rifled through the shelves and refrigerated canisters and wondered if he should have asked Ben to add food to their list of items to buy. He didn’t have any more of Ben’s special tea, and he wasn’t sure he’d know how to brew it anyway, so he filled a mug with water, and also heated some of the last of the packaged broth.

He returned with them on the tray. Cal was observing the ceiling as if it had asked him a particularly difficult question, but when Luke entered, Cal glanced to the side and his expression smoothed.

“Thank you,” Cal said. He tried to sit up, levering himself onto one elbow, but sat back with a hiss, hand going to his ribs.

“Here,” Luke said. He stepped to Cal’s side and set the tray down. He held out a hand. “Can I?” Cal nodded after only a slight hesitation, and Luke slipped an arm behind his back and helped him to sit up. He helped Cal drink the water and the broth, privately pleased that he seemed to have no trouble swallowing anymore. He tried not to examine why it felt so nice to feel the solid weight of Cal’s shoulder beneath his hand.

While Cal sipped at the broth, Luke filled him in on where they’d landed, and what the rest of the crew was up to. Cal absorbed this without question, though he huffed a laugh at Han’s plan to have Ben Force-wave them into a cheap purchase.

“Might work,” was Cal’s only comment. “Scrappers are tough to convince.” And Luke wondered how he knew that someone would be easy to hand-wave away. Was it a guessing game, or did Jedi get a feel for it? He resisted the impulse to ask.

Once both cups were empty, Luke helped Cal lie down again.

“Your name is Skywalker, right?” Cal said, while Luke was setting the mugs aside and reaching for the med kit.

Luke grinned, surprised that Cal had remembered. He’d only told him his name the one time, after all, back on the destroyer. “You can call me Luke,” he said.

“Luke,” Cal said, the name turning to a smile in his mouth. He held out his gloved hand, and Luke clasped it, careful not to squeeze to hard.

“I think I knew a Jedi named Skywalker,” Cal said when they let go, and the warmth in Luke’s chest turned to ice. “Or,” Cal squinted upwards, remembering. “I didn’t know him, I don’t think. Just heard of him. I was pretty young.”

Luke was grateful that Cal wasn’t looking at him. Cal couldn’t possibly know Vader’s identity, Luke decided. Surely he wouldn’t be able to speak the name so casually if he did.

“My father,” Luke said finally, when the silence was threatening to stretch too long.

Whatever emotion was in Luke’s voice, Cal clearly interpreted it as grief. He blinked, and looked at Luke, regret bleeding onto his face. “Oh,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Luke said. “I never knew him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Luke said, and surprised himself with how sharp he sounded.

Cal blinked at him, surprised maybe, but didn’t appear offended. “Okay.”

Kicking himself internally, Luke changed the subject. “Do you mind if I take a look at the blaster wound?”

Cal opened his mouth, then shut it and swallowed. He looked very much like he wanted to say no.

“I’ll try to be quick,” Luke offered, assuming Cal was tired of getting fussed over. “I just want to make sure it’s not getting infected or anything.” Not that he would necessarily know if it were, but Cal didn’t need to know that.

Cal looked down at the bandage, then up at Luke’s face again. Finally, he shrugged and lifted his chin, pulling his arm away from his side to give Luke better access. He tilted his head back against the pillow and his eyes drifted back up to the ceiling, as if it were too much effort to look anywhere else.

Luke pulled down the blanket, and took a moment to inspect the bruising on his lower ribs, which were also fading to a more grayish green color.

“Does it hurt a lot?” Luke asked, turning his attention back to the blaster wound. He began to peel back the adhesive.

“Yeah,” Cal said, after a moment. He said the word mildly, but when Luke glanced up, Cal’s eyes were closed, his jaw tight.

Luke stopped pulling at the adhesive. “Am _I_ hurting you?”

“No,” Cal said, eyes still closed.

“Are you sure?” Luke said.

Cal huffed through his nose. “Please just do it,” he said, forcing his eyes open and tightening his lips in what was probably supposed to be a smile.

Luke, a little puzzled, got back to work. After a moment, he said, “Did anybody tend to this while you were on the destroyer.”

Another huff. “Nope.”

Luke hummed. He removed the last of the tape, then peeled the gauze back. “It looks better,” he told Cal. The burns on the edges were less blistered, peeling in places and with the beginnings of fresh shiny skin peeking through. The center still looked the same though—charred black, though the burnt-meat smell had thankfully dissipated. The bacta ointment had absorbed completely, which seemed like a good sign. Luke unscrewed the tube’s lid and added a bit more into the center, then apologized quickly when Cal hissed and squeezed his eyes shut.

“It’s fine,” Cal said, his voice tight. When he opened his eyes again, his expression was serene, almost distant.

Luke rebandaged the injury slowly, gingerly, trying not to put any more pressure than necessary.

Luke set the tools back in the med kit and said, “Finished.”

Cal looked down and touched the bandage with light fingers. His hand shook. “Thank you.”

“Any time,” Luke said, feeling bad for hurting him, still feeling guilty for snapping. He hadn’t intended to let the well of anger and grief that he felt around his father spill over onto Cal. Cal hadn’t done anything to deserve that.

“Have we heard anything else from the Empire?” Cal asked. His eyes were still on his hand, his index finger traveling the square border of the bandage again and again.

“No, we haven’t,” Luke said. “Nothing since we first shut off the engines.”

Cal nodded and stopped tracing the bandage. He pressed his hand flat to the center of his chest and closed his eyes for a long moment, and it was only then that Luke wondered if he should be concerned.

“Are you—” he started to ask, but Cal cut him off.

“Could I—?” Cal’s voice was controlled, so soft that it was almost hard to hear. When he looked up at Luke, something had dissolved at the edge of his smile, and Luke realized that Cal’s breathing, though still quiet, had turned fast and shallow. Cal gritted his teeth, swallowed whatever he’d been about to say, then said instead, “Could you give me a minute?”

“Oh,” Luke said. He resisted the impulse to take Cal’s hand or pull him into a hug. Instead, he tried to inject all of that warmth into his voice as he said, “Sure. Of course. If you need anything, I won’t be far.”

He took the mugs and stepped out of the room, walking quickly away and down the hallway, but not quickly enough to avoid hearing the sharp, quiet sound of Cal’s voice breaking in a sob.

In the cooking area, he mechanically set the mugs in the cleaner and set it to run while he tucked the tray away and tidied the already tidy countertops.

He wondered what had triggered Cal, if anything. Maybe it was the pain from the wound, or maybe he was just overtaxed and the exhaustion had gotten to him. Or, Luke thought, maybe he had done or said something wrong—that seemed pretty likely, actually. He should’ve just left the talking to BD-1.

He wished more than anything that Cal hadn’t asked him to leave.

He sat at the round table in the common area, then sighed when he realized that there was still some of the cheap bandage adhesive on his fingertips. They’d already picked up a couple of coarse brown Wookiee hairs. Beside him, the ship’s communicator crackled. He sighed again, scrubbed his hands over his face, then reached over and flipped it on.

Ben’s figure bloomed to life, and Luke instantly felt a little better.

“I’m sorry Luke,” Ben said without greeting. “I must be brief. We have to go to the next town over.” His voice warped, crackling with the hologram signal. “We’re going to stay the night in the next town, and we should be back late tomorrow evening.”

“Okay,” Luke said, his stomach sinking at the thought of a night left to his own thoughts. “Okay, yeah. That’s fine.”

“Is everyone well on your end?” Ben asked.

“Yeah,” Luke said, trying to force some cheer into his voice. “Yeah, we’re good.”

After that, Ben bid him farewell. The hologram went dark. Luke dropped his forehead to the table and groaned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and for all of the lovely comments! This one’s kind of a bigger chunk, hope you enjoy


	12. Chapter 12

Cal regretted sending Skywalker away almost immediately. He even considered calling him back, except his mouth and throat and lungs wouldn’t work together to get the words out. So instead, he let himself cry a while, then pressed his palms to his eyes, and tried to get his breathing under control. His chest ached dully, his heart still pounding, and he wanted nothing more than for someone, anyone, to hold him tight and tell him it was going to be okay.

BD-1 gave a questioning warble.

Cal sighed and tilted his head to the side, letting the tears absorb into the pillowcase. “I just—” he swallowed and “Just got overwhelmed, I guess,” he finally said, though that wasn’t the entire truth.

He’d felt it coming when Luke began to tend to the wound on Cal’s chest.

He sifted through his feelings delicately, trying to find the source. Luke’s touch had been gentle, and while Cal’s wound was tender enough that even gentleness hurt, it hadn’t been that bad. It wasn’t even what Luke had been doing, not really.

It was, he realized after some thought, the clinicality. Luke’s fingers had done their best to touch him as little as possible, his eyes avoiding Cal’s. And that, paired with the proximity, had evoked dark memories—of the imperial officer’s disinterested fingers as they probed into the raw wound on Cal’s chest—the stormtrooper casually rolling up Cal’s sleeve for the med droid’s injection—helmeted faces, turned carefully away while Cal screamed on the interrogation table—and while the memories were accompanied by physical pain, that was nothing compared to the suffocating knowledge that, to the people in those memories, he wasn’t a sentient being. Not really. Sure, these people took no pleasure from Cal’s pain, but they also felt no conflict over it. He was just one prisoner out of the hundreds or thousands that the ship had seen, and he was just a tool: his wellbeing worth only as much as his limited usefulness, his suffering no more than a means to an end.

Even thinking of it now, alone in the room, Cal felt a sob working its way up his throat. He let it out, then pulled BD-1’s little body closer and murmured, “My head’s really messed up, BD.”

BD-1’s scanner flashed, briefly blinding him. When it flickered off, the droid announced firmly that he detected no head injuries. But, perhaps another human ought to take a look just in case BD-1’s calibrations were off.

Cal rubbed the stars from his eyes. “Just a figure of speech, buddy. How could I have hit my head since you last scanned me?”

BD-1’s next warble was long and disapproving, and Cal squinted a smile at him. “I promise I’ll tell you if I feel even a little bit unwell.” That resulted in an only somewhat mollified chatter, and Cal was quick to specify, “More unwell than I already do, obviously,” and then let out a strained huff of a laugh. It was odd to casually refer to his injuries as if he were merely recovering from the sleeping flu or some spaceport virus.

BD-1’s lens focused on him suspiciously, and Cal could only shrug and attempt to stifle the next chuckle as he said, “Sorry buddy. Biological emotions.”

It was probably for the best that Luke had left. Cal didn’t want to force the other man sit with him through another breakdown. The kindness Luke had shown him thus far was worth more than Cal knew how to thank him for, but it was not something Cal had a right to continue relying upon. They weren’t friends. They weren’t even truly comrades. As far as he could tell, Skywalker didn’t seem to be part of the Rebellion. If anything, Cal had been functioning under the vague assumption that he was a civilian who had been roped into Kenobi’s plans somehow, like the pilot and the Wookiee.

But no, that couldn’t be right; Skywalker had just said that he was from a Jedi bloodline—a claim that Cal found himself examining again with some skepticism now that he thought about it. Cal was certain other Jedi had taken lovers or spouses, but it was such an illicit, secretive thing for a Jedi to do. He’d never heard of someone claiming to be the child of a Jedi.

Then again, the Jedi Order so long gone that there was exactly zero chance of backlash at this point.

Luke could be Kenobi’s padawan, he supposed. Although if that were true, Luke seemed woefully undertrained and undereducated for a padawan who’d already reached adulthood. Perhaps Kenobi had chosen not to train him in the Force for some reason. Luke was certainly Force-sensitive; Cal could sense that now that he’d finally spent some time with him while lucid.

And Luke certainly wasn’t with the dark side. When Cal had woken from his dark dreams to find Luke standing in his room, his presence hadn’t been alarming. It had almost been comforting.

Stars, Cal wanted to trust him.

But he hadn’t even been able to express his panic to Luke just a few minutes before. While those memories tangled him between the past and the present, Cal had just done his best to hide his fear, trying to respond normally to Luke’s attempts at conversation.

He didn’t understand why he’d done that. He wasn’t the sort to stifle or hide his emotions—much to Cere’s frustration. He knew the Jedi Order had opinions on controlling emotions. Cal sometimes wondered if, were the Jedi Council to meet him now, they would have been willing to keep him in the order.

Logically, Cal knew that if he’d asked Luke to leave him alone at any moment, Luke would have listened. Luke had no reason not to, and he didn’t strike Cal as a sadist. Far from it.

In fact, when Cal had gotten enough of a hold of himself to ask Luke to leave, Luke had done just that. And Luke’s tending hadn’t even hurt that much, more a sharp discomfort than real pain. But for that long stretch of minutes, some wounded part of Cal had been completely certain that if he asked Luke to stop, Luke would have ignored him.

It was irrational. He knew that. Still, he’d been too afraid to test it.

Cal knew that irrational beliefs and emotions were common, he was familiar enough with them in himself, but he hadn’t felt so overwhelmed by them in years. These kinds of distorted, painful thoughts and emotions were the sort that could lead someone down dark paths, if left to fester.

Traditionally, Jedi distanced themselves from such emotions through strict fasting and meditation practices. Cal had always struggled with those practices, and not for lack of trying. Distancing himself from his emotions tended to cause them to erupt with greater strength the next time they resurfaced, and so Cal got by on own version of meditation, which focused more on sitting with his emotions and making peace with them or feeding their energy into the Force.

Cal hadn’t properly meditated or communed with the Force since before his capture. Sure, he’d made his best attempts at calming trances in the cell on the star destroyer, but those had been scattered, fragmented meditations at best, his concentration interrupted often by his struggling physical body.

He could feel that lack now, his fear and anger and hurt catching painfully against each other like raw, abraded skin.

Coming to a decision, he closed his eyes, settled back against his pillow, and tried, tentatively to drop into a trance. He focused first on his surroundings, on the buzzing of the lights overhead and the quiet murmurings and hissings of the ship’s air and water filtration systems. He could smell the metallic bite in the air, and the mech oil on BD-1’s casing. Now and then the bed would shake minutely and there would be the distant groan of the outer hull flexing against some outside pressure. A sandstorm, maybe. Luke had said they were on a desert planet.

With some apprehension, he turned his attention inward.

* * *

Cal started his meditation as he always did. He imagined himself on Bogano, lying flat on his back in the grass above the workshop on a warm night—something he’d never done in real life because of the beasts and the mud, but which he’d always felt an irrational desire to try. He imagined the ground and grass pillowed against his back, the gentle breeze warm and humid. He leaned into the sensations of it, the smell of the damp soil, the distant symphony of the insects and amphibians that chirped and croaked into the night air, focusing on every detail until it felt completely real. Above him, he visualized the Force as a vivid, colorful sky of stars.

He imagined his own consciousness as a point of light, anchored within him. In the sky, each point of yellow and orange was a source of life, the pale purple spaces between them made of the dimmer connective tissue of the physical world. He knew that if he wanted to, he could stretch himself out and touch any one of those little lights, connect to the different lives in the planet around him, but he didn’t do that now. Instead, he just watched the stars a while, settling into steady, regular breaths as they turned around him, some intersecting with each other and then going their separate ways, some new ones sparking into brilliant existence, some others dimming and then going dark.

When he felt that he’d slowed his heart and breath as much as he could, he peeled himself away from his space in the grass and pushed to his feet. In the back of his awareness, he could still feel his real body lying on its bed, but the physical pains and exhaustions didn’t belong to him right then; they were just another part of the landscape.

Gaze still on the sky, he felt into his core, taking stock of his physical body impersonally but compassionately, as if he were looking over someone else, noting the healing wounds and the bruises and the muscles that had strained and wasted from days of overuse and without food. He took stock of the little places where his mental state and physical state fed into each other—the somatic reactions mirroring the turmoil within. He felt the cold weight in the pit of his stomach, tied to the impatience of an unfinished mission; the clenching in his jaw that connected to the anxiety of being so vulnerable among strangers; the warmth in his chest where he felt gratitude and fondness and pride, a warmth that was directed at BD-1, but also at these people who had worked so hard to rescue Cal from the Empire.

He felt also into a fresh tightness in his throat, and gently caught hold of the thread of fear that bloomed to life under his attention. He imagined the sensation as a taut rope that stretched into the distance. It lay heavy and tangible in his bare palm, the coarse fibers damp and gritty from the mud.

He began to walk, letting the rope feed loosely through his grip, watching the horizon, stepping carefully around the marshy ground, passing other formless emotions and thoughts that manifested as blurry structures in the distance, stealing occasional glances at the mesmerizing light show above.

He’d dealt with fear before, knew the different shapes that it took within him and the structures of thought and emotion and unconscious reaction that fear built: the dread of the unknown, the loss of people he loves, the primal revulsion against death. These were all powerful emotions, but ones he knew well and had learned to make his peace with. He could step inside and explore them as if walking into a building, restructuring them and adding to them as needed, and then stepping back out again whenever it became overwhelming.

But now, rather than a structure that he could traverse, he reached the end of the rope and found a twisted, grotesque, pit. It stretched in front of him like a wound, all torn and messy at the edges. He hesitated at the edge, eyeing the place where the roped plunged over the edge and disappeared into the darkness.

He let go of the rope and crouched at the edge. He leaned forward slightly to look into the pit but saw only darkness, interspersed with blinding flashing light, as if he were looking into a thunderstorm. Around him, the grass rustled and flattened as the gentle breeze stirred into a strong, steady gusting. It emanated from the pit, he realized, but also seemed to also be rushing down into it, tugging at Cal’s hair and clothing as if to draw him forward, picking up bits of grass and soil and sending them over the edge.

Cal inched backward, fighting the wind. He’d never seen anything like this pit. Certainly not within his own mind. It felt like a living thing, stretching and churning and calling to him like something sapient. He thought maybe that he could hear voices within it, familiar ones, whispering and muttering, though he couldn’t understand anything they said.

Unsettled, he considered simply turning around and leaving. Whatever this was, it was clearly too powerful for him to explore, at least for now. Perhaps if he gave it time, the intensity of it would lessen, and he could approach it without causing more harm to himself. It had taken him years to process the memories of Master Tapal’s death; they had been so powerful that they’d blocked him from the Force for years. When he’d tried forcing through it before he was ready, all he’d done was send himself into a dark spiral of shame and self-recrimination that had eaten at him like a disease.

Just as he decided to leave, the wind slammed into him with the strongest gust yet. He steadied himself against it, and then a whirling blow yanked him off his legs entirely, and then he was slip-sliding on his hands and knees on ground that had begun to steepen and tilt, sending him in the direction of the pit.

He scrambled backward against the pull and reached out automatically, some desperate strength of will moving within him and calling on the Force, as if that could possibly be something useful within the confines of his own mind. He dug his fingers into the soft soil on either side of him, grip closing around the dense network of grassy roots, watching as a maelstrom rose from the pit, popping and crackling like a hull-welder. It arced out toward him with sickly, white-hot fingers.

His muscles seized up beneath its touch, then went limp, frying the strength from his limbs and making him fall entirely to the ground, where the warm, muddy grass and mud gave way to icy metal at his back. The roots twisted from his grip and twined around him, morphing into bruising cuffs that tightened as he tried to slip free until they were cutting into his skin. A hand touched his neck, gentle for a moment and then closing like a vice until he could feel his windpipe collapsing.

He squeezed his eyes shut and reached blindly for his physical body while the electricity coursed through him, every square centimeter of him tearing, muscles tightening until they must be splitting against his bones, skin burning to raw flesh.

Abruptly, he felt he wasn’t alone, or that he wasn’t actually himself. A cacophony of other voices existed in that space with him, suffering with him—or perhaps he suffered with them. And the louder their cries became around him, the less he became himself and the more he became them instead, his suffering no longer a mirror of their pain but the pain itself.

Some small, lucid part of him knew them to be echoes of some sort, but it was impossible to extricate himself from them. And that same part of him that knew that this pain wasn’t real, that if he could just gain some modicum of control, he’d be able to break the trance and tear himself out of it. Again, he tried to reach for his body, but he couldn’t sense it at all now.

With that realization, the fear and pain turned to panic, and that small, lucid part of him finally lost its tenuous grip. He twisted against the cuffs, forgetting that they weren’t real. He gasped against the grip on his throat, no longer aware that his real throat was pulling in air just fine. And, with some confusion, he began to believe that the voices around him truly were his own, that he had lived all of these lives. He’d shouldered each and every failure, felt every moment of agony, died every single death.

He felt his lips move. The roar of the blood rushing through his ears made it impossible to hear what he’d said, or if he’d even made a sound past the constriction in his throat. Still, just for a moment, he thought maybe he heard something answer. He tilted his head, eyes rolling blindly in his head, trying to pinpoint the call.

And then, there, his own name cut again through the chaos like a light through dense fog. He tried to respond, but there was nothing sensible left in him.

Something—no, someone, caught hold of his shoulders and shook him, roughly, urgently. Panic still holding him, Cal hurled the person away from him—but as if that person’s touch had briefly driven away the other voices, he remembered that the cuffs weren’t really cuffs and the pain wasn’t all really his, and he finally tore himself away from it, out of the pit, and out of the trance entirely. 

Cal shot upright. His hands flew to his throat, but there was nothing there. There was nothing holding him down. He was alone in his own mind.

He became aware that he was breathing in rapid, heaving gasps. His mouth tasted like salt. Sweat or tears or both dripped from the tip of his nose as he doubled over as much as his stiff muscles would allow and and pressed his face into his hands, feeling for a bizarre moment that his fingers were the only things keeping his head from flying apart.

“Cal,” someone said. Cal twisted toward the voice with a jerk and then deflated at the sight of an oddly windswept-looking Luke picking himself up from the floor in the far corner of the room.

“Luke,” Cal rasped, the name barely a sound in his mouth. He looked around, taking in the dented and loose wall paneling, the freshly cracked light fixture, his own bedding hanging from a vent. A mug lay shattered on the floor beside the opposite wall. His ears were ringing.

BD-1 was mag-latched to the floor as if he were preparing for a crash landing. His display glowed an emergency red, but he looked unharmed.

Cal looked back at Luke, who he now realized had a hand pressed to his side, as if he were injured. Horror rising, Cal tried to find the breath to ask if Luke way okay, but Luke spoke first.

“You’ve hurt yourself,” Luke said. He gestured at Cal with a jerk of his chin.

Cal blinked, then looked down at himself and saw that the clean white square of bandage was now soaked through in blackish red. He touched it with clumsy fingers. He was still gasping. He tried to slow his breaths, feeling light-headed.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said, and Cal turned to him yet again in surprise. Cal grimaced. Luke wasn’t the idiot who’d let a trance go so wrong that he’d apparently damaged everything in a several-meter radius.

Still, Cal couldn’t find his breath to say any of that, and Luke continued, speaking quickly, “I could, uh, feel you having a nightmare. I shouldn’t have shaken you like that but—” he gritted his teeth and stood upright, stretching a little as if to ensure he hadn’t broken anything. “But we’ve got a problem.”

It was only then, finally, that Cal realized that the ringing in his ears was actually the ship’s proximity alarm, blaring distantly from the cockpit. Cal looked back at Luke, and whatever his expression was, it made Luke stand up straighter.

“Empire?” Cal said, forcing the word out.

Luke shook his head. “I don’t know who. But they’re on speeders. Coming fast.”

Cal scrubbed his hands over his face, then through his hair. “Okay,” he said finally, mind racing. His eyes landed briefly on his lightsaber, which still leaned, solely unaffected, by the doorway. He sighed, then turned to Luke and said, “You have blasters?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, next chapter we get back to action!
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me through the long wait, folks. I’m really grateful to everyone who has commented so far - knowing that someone’s reading this really helps keep me inspired to write when it feels like I don’t have the space for it.
> 
> I hope you’re all doing well, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Happy New Year <3


End file.
